One of the first things I wanted to read on my iriver story was the montly msdn subscription magazine which is available as a .chm. Which unfortunately the iriver story does not support, so I needed to convert it into either .pdf or .epub format.
As I am both a Mac and Windows user my choices were various from using a pdf printer on Windows to using various .chm readers on the Mac.
I first tried to use a .pdf printer on Windows but this not work due me using a 64bit version of Windows 7 and all the free pdf printers failed to either install or just simply did not work… much to my own frustration, so I turned to the Mac as this has native pdf support but did not have native .chm support! Don’t you just love computers…
On my mac I tried out various, these being:
Again, I was meet with disappointment all of them either failed to display the embedded html in the .chm magazine (complaining about a nbsp entity) or just not displaying anything. So decided to raise a bug against the most the one I thought had the most chance of being fixed, which was the iChm application.
So to my joy and delight the developer fixed it in version 1.4.2 and I was then able to load up the .chm, select Unicode encoding (as without this the pages did not display correctly) and then use the iChm function to export the .chm as a .pdf, copy it to the iriver story and I could then get back to reading all the years issues I had failed to read!
So my tip for converting .chm to .pdf on the Mac is to use iChm as it works and the developer is very responsive to issues raised or was at least was for me! 🙂
Although I haven’t tried myself with chm files, apparantly CutePFD Writer (freeware) now supports 64-bit Windows 7. http://www.cutepdf.com
Thanks for the tip, I will try it out and see what happens!
There’s chm2pdf tool. It’s bash script that extracts stuff from chm file and prints html with htmldoc.