Comments on: .chm to .pdf conversion in Mac OS X?

Question: .chm to .pdf conversion in Mac OS X?

Señor Pantalones — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 14:11:51 -0800

.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...

By: kindall

kindall — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 15:06:53 -0800

Suggest finding someone with a Windows box to do this for you using a tool like this one.

By: sharkfu

sharkfu — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 16:24:11 -0800

Open and print to pdf maybe? Opener #1 or Opener #2

By: Señor Pantalones

Señor Pantalones — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 18:23:51 -0800

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

By: TeatimeGrommit

TeatimeGrommit — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:07:03 -0800

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.

By: spock

spock — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 21:01:24 -0800

File Juicer. OS X can "print" anything to pdf, so you need chm to html converter which you can then "print" to PDF.

By: luriete

luriete — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 21:48:50 -0800

Simplest: don't print multiple pages to PDF.

Simply print entire document to postscript.

Distill. Done.

By: Señor Pantalones

Señor Pantalones — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:30:47 -0800

"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.

By: Señor Pantalones

Señor Pantalones — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:52:00 -0800

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.

By: Señor Pantalones

Señor Pantalones — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:24:40 -0800

oops, make that russian software mirror

By: monkeymadness

monkeymadness — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:03:57 -0800

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?

By: kjell

kjell — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 12:16:02 -0800

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...