chm

Package CHM is a set of units distributed with FPC 2.2.2 and newer that allow to read/write .chm compressed html help files on multiple platforms. There are two projects that read these, the textmode IDE ( 2.2.2 not yet), and the Lazarus chmhelp package (which features a separate helpsystem, connected over TCPIP). The original author is Andrew Haines, but some parts are by others (specially Lars/z505).

It is expected that in the next FPC release, chm will replace the doc-html archive with its thousands of separate htmls.

The package is pure pascal, and thus portable in principle (and seems to have had endianess fixes). 64-bit status not known yet.

Units

1. chmbase - some structures, constants and helper funcs (compare and compression streaming helpers)
2. chmfiftimain - the unit that is responsible for reading and writing the search index of chms (TChmSearchReader, TChmSearchWriter)
3. chmfilewriter - TChmProject, a class that describes a CHM project in the form of a XML description. Can be used to generate CHMs easily.
4. chmreader - the base CHM Reader
5. chmsitemap - Support for sitemaps (toc and index, the unit helps transforming these xml files to collections)
6. chmspecialfiles - Streaming helpers for special index files in the chm
7. chmtypes - CHM helper class types.
8. chmwriter - the base CHM Writer.
9. fasthtmlparser - Base skeleton of a html parser.
10. htmlindexer - Contains classes that TChmWriter uses to parse and index the contents of html files for searching
11. htmlutil - helperfunctions. Mostly getting info out of html/xml tags.
12. paslznonslide - (de)compression routines
13. paslzxcomp - (de)compression routines
14. paslzx - (de)compression routines

Files

Besides the library units, there are also two endprograms:

• chmls - lists contents of a chm
• chmcmd - creates CHM starting from a XML (TCHMProject class) (?)

See also

• chm backend for fpdoc
• Textmode IDE development
• Lazarus chmhelp component