FPC doc comes in .chm format

.chm format is still my favorite file format for electronics document. Especially if I intend to read it on computer screen. Yes, it’s not printer friendly format but it’s very easy to navigate and have built-in search engine. For printer friendly format, of course I still prefer .pdf.

Unfortunately, FreePascal documentations don’t come with .chm format. It does provide many file formats, such as .pdf, .html, .dvi, .ps, even .txt! But still… no .chm. 😦 Since I don’t like .pdf on computer screen, I don’t like the layout of html page, even more the .txt format… it seems that I had no choice but convert it to .chm by myself.

The easiest way to do it is using the html files as source. For the conversion tool, I use winCHM. No, I didn’t buy it, I just use the 15 days trial edition. 😀 Due its complexity, I failed to run the tool on Ubuntu using wine. I had to use Windows then. This would be my first time login to Windows after I didn’t touch it for about 3 months! 😀

I got no problem with the tool on Windows, it just simply run. The problem came from the fpc’s document. They aren’t too .chm friendly. 😦 The conversion was resulting a horrible index file structure! I had been already too far to get back, so I continued this effort. It was weekend anyway. Patiently, I rearranged the index structure one-by-one manually. After about 6 hours work, I finally made it! 😀

You can download the result, FreePascal v.2.2.0 documentation in .chm flavor, here. By combining FPC’s document, Lazarus wiki, and Delphi help, I think I’d be able to code anything. 😀

After all this is done, I back to Ubuntu and using Gnome’s CHMViewer to view the result. Nice. Now I can browse, jump, and search the whole document without being lost within the text jungle. 😀

Hope this would help someone else too. 😉