facti.net

Quite a few ebooks are starting to show up as chm (Microsoft help) files. If you don't use Windows as your main platform that can be a nuisance. Luckily there is a nice simple library to convert chm files to html files under Linux: chmlib. Unfortunately the Fedora packages do not include the example binaries needed to convert the files. To convert these files, download the source chmlib package from http://www.jedrea.com/chmlib/ then

tar xvzf chmlib-0.39.tar.gz 
cd chmlib-0.39
./configure --enable-examples
make
sudo make install
cd src/

then

./extract_chmLib <chmfile> <outdir>

where <chmfile> is the name of the chm file and <outdir> is the name of the folder to put the extracted files. Within the extracted files will be a folder that contains all the html files.

Note that the generated index.html is not terribly useful. I find it convenient to change the name of index.html to links.html and copy the toc.html file to the index.html. This way when looking at the folder as a web page the table of contents shows up as the first page.