Has anybody using Slackware found a way to convert .CHMs to .PDFs or text files? I have some pretty nice doc that I would like to be able to read on my Linux machines.

Thanks,
Rand

Take a look at xchm:
http://xchm.sourceforge.net/

Thanks, man. I will try it later and report back to the group if I succeed (or more likely, break something)

KDE 3.5.1 opens chm files within konqueror.

Works way better than xchm for me, the pages are rendered much more accurately.

Samac

That is interesting news; maybe there's a KDE module we can use. I don't run KDE, or I would just do like you said. Thanks for the info.

For watching chm files I use HelpExplorer. In my opinion it renders chm files really good. But as I haven't used xchm or konqueror I can't compare them.


But if you have to convert chm files, here is a quick description how I convert them:

You need chmlib and htmldoc. Both are available at linuxpackages.net

1. extract_chmLib file.chm tempDir
2. htmldoc --no-title -d outputDir tempDir/*.htm

After these two steps you will find a index.html in the output directory.

With htmldoc you can also create a pdf or a single html file, but I get the best results with the mentioned steps.

Thanks, man. I only have to do this once (I hope) so I can even do it on doze if I can find an easier deal. Then I just pipe them over to my linux machines.

By the way, in case anyone cares, xpdf seems way better than gv. I started using it today and it's pretty nice for viewing doc because you can search. I couldn't find a search in gv. Also, I had a .PDF that gv couldn't open, but I had no problems when I used xpdf. Neither of them seem to do much good zooming on pages, though.

I could NEVER get xchm to work...but I got Kchm under KDE working like a champ...Didn't know about Konqueror...thanks for the tip.

Did you try turning off the option to Respect Document Structure in gv?

What's the problem? Have you installed all the required dependencies? I can install it and it's working great at my system

Ok, I finally had time to do this. I did like David Ross suggested and went to the xchm page. Actually I did an apt-get install on Debian just to see if I liked it- it works ok except the forwards/backwards buttons only work if you've already been there!

There are some prereqs, like wxGTK2.6 and chmlib. It took a while to build all this from sources but it's pretty nice. I added my NTFS to the fstab (I know everybody else probably already did this but I said "no" during the installation.) Now at least my Win machine can be a dead doc/music server.

If you use rox you can setup default actions for double-clicks (or single clicks) so now I can read PDFs and CHMs from my Win machine and save duplicating stuff.

Thanks, David and everybody.

Regards,
Randux