AskAboutGadgets Archive

Does any eReader support CHM?

• posted by: Ian Boyd on 2010-08-29
• tagged: ebook, e-reader, ebook-reader, e-ink
• score: 1

Does any eReader support CHM?

i currently read CHM files on iPhone using a CHM app, but it's just too small actually read; so i'm looking to get an eInk based eReader.

But it has to support CHM - as i'm not converting them to other formats.

Edit: The problem with converting to a PDF is managing to get

• being able to increase text-size, and reflowing the content
• links maintained
• no cut-off text, or text that runs off the end of the virtual A5 page.

Answer 1637

• posted by: Broam on 2010-08-30
• score: 1

CHM is one of those proprietary Microsoft formats I doubt many e-Readers are rushing to support. Your best bet is probably one of the Android-based ones that allows side-loading, and hoping that some enterprising hacker manages to put an application together to read CHM.

Answer 1653

• posted by: Edwin on 2010-08-31
• score: 1

I have an eReader from Onyx, the Boox 60, which supports .CHM directly.

Haven't used the feature before, but a short test viewing xunit-1.6.1.chm showed:

• links are maintained
• increasing text size does reflow text.
• Text cuteoff depending on which page is viewed: for example:
  "Namespaces > XUnit > Assert" no cutoff and reflow
  "Namespaces > XUnit " Cutoff on rightside (as it also does in the desktop windows help viewer)

So how well CHM is displayed on the eReader depends also on the original page formatting.

Answer 1643

• posted by: MatthewMartin on 2010-08-30
• score: 0

You might be better off converting the chm to html before attempting to read it.

For example: http://www.gridinsoft.com/chm.php

or http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-convert-chm-files-to-html-or-pdf-files.html

Ideally you'd want to get the chm to convert to a single great big XHTML file so that it would be easy to convert to mobi or kindle format

Answer 1645

• posted by: Lorenzo on 2010-08-31
• score: 0

I'm not aware of any eBook reader that directly supports CHM, you have to convert them to a supported format with a tool like MobiPocket.

Answer 1652

• posted by: Davy Landman on 2010-08-31
• score: 0

Because CHM is just a archive around a bunch of HTML, CSS and image files you could manually extract it (using 7zip) and run the html through a smart conversion tool.

Or use Calibre, which has given me some nice CHM -> ebook conversions.

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