1. OVERVIEW KchmViewer is a chm (MS HTML help file format) viewer, written in C++. Unlike most existing CHM viewers for Unix, it uses Trolltech Qt widget library, and does not depend on KDE or Gnome. However, it may be compiled with full KDE support, including KDE widgets and KIO/KHTML. The main advantage of KchmViewer is extended support for non-English languages. Unlike others, KchmViewer in most cases correctly detects chm file encoding, correctly shows tables of context of Russian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese help files, and correctly searches in non-English help files (search for MBCS languages - ja/ko/ch is still in progress). KchmViewer is written by Georgy Yunaev (gyunaev@ulduzsoft.com), and is licensed under GNU GPL license. Please do NOT use this email for bug reporting; see below. 2. FEATURES - Standalone viewer, depends on Qt only. Does not require KDE, Gnome or wxWindows toolkit. - A KDE viewer can be compiled optionally, with KIO slave, KHTML and K*Widget support. - Completely safe and harmless. Does not support JavaScript in any way, optionally warns you before opening an external web page, or switching to another help file. - Correctly detects and shows encoding of any valid chm file. - Correctly shows non-English chm files, including cyrillic, chinese, japanese and others. - Correctly searches in non-English chm files using chm built-in search index. - Shows an appropriate image for every TOC entry. - Has complete chm index support, including multiple index entries, cross-links and parent/child entries in index. - Persistent bookmarks support. Allows to store bookmarks even if "Favorites" window was not enabled for this chm file. Also stores the screen position for every bookmark. You can also edit/delete bookmarks. - For any opened chm file, stores the last opened window, search history, bookmark history, font size and so on, so when you open this file again, everything is always on the place. - Has easy and powerful search-in-page support. - Allows to increase or decrease the font size, so physically handicapped people can read texts easily. - Has standard Back/Forward/Home navigation. - Can print the opened pages on a standard printer (usually via CUPS). - Has complex search query support. You can use search queries like "lazy people" + learn -not. 3. INSTALLATION Usually kchmviewer is distributed in source code archive, so you need to compile it first. It compiles with Qt 3.x, but recommended Qt version is 3.3.4 and above. This is due to font resizing bug existing in previous Qt versions, so if you use pre-3.3.4, you will have problems with font sizes. Note that you need to install qt3-devel package, not only qt package. 3.1. Qt-only version To compile Qt-only version of kchmviewer, follow the simple procedure: > tar zxf kchmviewer-.tar.gzi > cd kchmviewer- > ./configure > make > sudo make install The last step is optional; you can use kchmviewer binary without installation. 3.2 KDE version This procedure will create the Qt-only executable, which does not use KDE. If you want to compile executable for KDE, add --with-kde to configure options. For KDE version, 'make install' is required to work with KHTML browser. Note that you need tdelibs-devel package installed. > tar zxf kchmviewer-.tar.gz > cd kchmviewer- > ./configure --with-kde > make > sudo make install 3.3 x86-64 version To compile kchmviewer version for x86-64, make sure that you have installed 64-bit qt and qt-devel libraries, and specify the path to them with --with-qt-libraries= configure switch: > tar zxf kchmviewer-.tar.gz > cd kchmviewer- > ./configure --with-qt-libraries=/usr/lib/qt3/lib64 [--with-kde (optional)] > make > sudo make install If you experience any link error, make sure you have all 64bit libraries installed. Look careful on error messages; usually they point you to right direction. 4. USAGE Usage of kchmviewer is simple: > kchmviewer mychmfile.chm for the rest of command-line options, see kchmviewer --help 5. BUG REPORTING Please use kchmviewer@ulduzsoft.com for bug reporting. 6. THANKS Thanks to: - Jed Wing, the author of chmlib. This library is used by kchmviewer to access chm content. - Razvan Cojocaru, the author of xchm. I used some ideas and chm processing code from xchm. - All the users, who report bugs, and suggest features. You help making kchnviewer better. 7. LICENSE kchmviewer is distributed under GNU GPL license. Copyright (C) 2004-2007 Georgy (George) Yunaev This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA