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We were shipping .hlp files to customers when development was in VC++. The process to create it was as follows:
1. Create rtf file
2. Create new project in WinHelp and then compile to get .hlp file.

Now development has moved to .net and also I found that we can no longer open .hlp files in windows 7 or vista.

I wanted to know if there are any free command line tools using which we can convert these .hlp files to a .chm file ?

Also I wanted to know if there are any free command line tools to convert .rtf file to .chm ?

Dale Athanasias
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Gurucharan Balakuntla Maheshku
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2 Answers2

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Microsoft has a tool which can convert Win Help projects to HTML Help. It is called HTML Help Workshop. You can open the existing .hpj project file with it and choose the option to convert it to HTML Help project .hhp. You can then compile the .hhp project with the same tool to generate the .chm file.

There are however many shortcomings in the tool. It generates an HTML page for each page in the rtf file but the naming of these HTML pages is random causing future referencing to be difficult.

If you just have the .hlp file and not the original Win Help project files, you can use a decompiler to generate the .hpj and .rtf files first and then convert them using HTML Help Workshop.

I found the following link quite helpful:

http://www.help-info.de/en/Help_Info_WinHelp/hw_converting.htm

EDIT: there are some 3rd party convertors and Help Authoring Tools (HATs) also available which may do the job better than HTML Help Workshop but most of them are not free.

Farish
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  • The "naming of these HTML pages" isn't quite random, but enough to be a pain. Try this AHK [script](http://www.theassimilationlab.com/forums/topic/16010-autohotkey-scripts/#entry351598) for a mass rename, but with 100 topics, 100 search & renames are still required. – Laurie Stearn May 06 '17 at 04:05
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Keep in mind that CHM is compiled HTML, and not very related to html, so your main problem is conversion of rtf to html

I would try to convert RTF to HTML, but on a topic per file.

What you could try is to input the RTF into word and try to save as HTML, and then use a program/script to split out the various topics to individual files and fixup references.

Then compile the result with a CHM compiler (like MS htmlhelp workshop)

Marco van de Voort
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