.chm to .pdf conversion in Mac OS X?

September 23, 2007 2:11 PM

.chm to PDF conversion, Mac OS X. There seems to be no easy way to do it. Does anyone have an effective and trustworthy workflow they can recommend? (more inside)

After recently switching to Papers for my eBook/journal librarian, I need to get rid of all these pesky .chm files. So far I've tried...

- Tubby (chm expander) to Acrobat Professional. Works, but you need to manually nest chapters and subchapters, and it throws some ugly markup artifacts into the document.

- Tubby to HTMLDoc (cli binary). Does a nice job converting to PDF, better than Acrobat, but spits it all out as one big unordered file, which needs far more reorganization.

- Chamonix -> Print. Only prints single pages as pdf, not entire document.

- chm2pdf (python). Looks promising but even after compiling for OS X it keeps failing...maybe I am doing something wrong.

Any tips would be appreciated, and if you haven't checked out Papers yet, you'll love it...

posted by Señor Pantalones to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Suggest finding someone with a Windows box to do this for you using a tool like this one.
posted by kindall at 3:06 PM on September 23, 2007

Open and print to pdf maybe? Opener #1 or Opener #2
posted by sharkfu at 4:24 PM on September 23, 2007

ha, would i risk asking on mefi if i didn't do my research? i think not! :) the problem is that neither chmox nor chamonix print the entire document to pdf. they only print single pages. and windows apps, while certainly a last-resort fallback, are not desirable for this situation
posted by Señor Pantalones at 6:23 PM on September 23, 2007

Borrowing a Windows box seems like the way to go, assuming you don't have Parallels / Windows on your Mac already. I mean, chm is really a Microsoft thing at heart.
posted by TeatimeGrommit at 7:07 PM on September 23, 2007

File Juicer. OS X can "print" anything to pdf, so you need chm to html converter which you can then "print" to PDF.
posted by spock at 9:01 PM on September 23, 2007

Simplest: don't print multiple pages to PDF.

Simply print entire document to postscript.

Distill. Done.
posted by luriete at 9:48 PM on September 23, 2007

"Distill. Done."

right, then manually reorganize all 300+ pages of the resulting pdf into headings, subheadings, chapters and subchapters. so, no :(

thanks for the advice so far but it's looking bleak. all the suggestions still require manual reorganization of the converted pdf.
posted by Señor Pantalones at 12:30 AM on September 24, 2007

Ok, I'm answering my own question after a day of searching...

The easy solution looks like a piece of abandonware called Chimp, a chm reader with built-in pdf export and spotlight searching. The developer's site is down, but I found it on a russian software mirror.
posted by Señor Pantalones at 12:52 AM on September 24, 2007

oops, make that russian software mirror
posted by Señor Pantalones at 8:24 PM on September 24, 2007

I just found out I need the same utility. I tried out Chimp but with the demo restrictions I can't tell if it will do what I need. I tried converting a large CHM and it crapped out halfway through. Get anywhere Senor?
posted by monkeymadness at 5:03 PM on November 5, 2007

I downloaded Chimp and registered it with a stolen key from SerialBox which you can find by looking around on torrent sites. Illegal, but there being no other way as far as I can tell...
posted by kjell at 12:16 PM on November 11, 2007