Re: Best Modern Alternative to CHM?

[Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com>]

MS HTML Help has been improved upon in countless ways. Some newer help
systems are much faster, particularly at searching. They're far more
customizable and extensible.

A .chm is not self-contained. The illusion that it is results from the
required viewer being bundled with Windows.

A .chm is composed of many individual files. They're just packaged as
a single file, similar to the way they would be a .zip archive. That's
why you can decompile the source from a .chm.

Whatever Microsoft's motives for doing that in 1997, there's currently
no good reason to distribute help as a separate package. Instead it's
packaged with the installer and the individual files are extracted on
installation. That makes no difference to the user experience except
maybe it's a bit faster since the files don't have to be extracted.

On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 10:37 AM, Mark Giffin <mgiffin -at- earthlink -dot- net> wrote:
> ... I happen to like .chm very much and consider that it is a high point for
> snappy self-contained help systems that has not been improved upon. All the
> newer ways to do things are not as fast and they consist of many individual
> files. ...
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