CHM or Microsoft’s Compiled HTML Help format is quite widespread these days. You’ll find a lot of ebooks and documentation in this format . For example both MySQL and Apache offer their documentation is this format – the latter doesn’t offer PDFs at all. I really wish Preview handled CHM files as well, but since it doesn’t, I’ve been looking for a CHM viewer on Mac OS that has similar polish.

I recently ran into two programs that come close to Preview’s handling of PDFs – both of them free and open source.

The first one is called ArCHMock and can be downloaded from their google code page.

My current favorite however, is a product called iChm – mostly because it allows me to search the index of a CHM file as well as search for a word within the page I am on. ArCHMock seems to unite these two search paradigms (ironically, much like Preview does for PDF files!).

iChm is hosted on google code too. iChm also has a paid ($6.99) version [iTunes App Store link] for iPod touch/iPhone – handy if you want to study those manuals on your long commute!

This entry was posted Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Software, Tips. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.