[Wine] CHM help not working

[James Hawkins]

On 10/25/07, L. Rahyen <research at science.su> wrote:
> On Thursday October 25 2007 04:04, Jeffrey Cobb wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-10-25 at 16:42 +1300, Ross Levis wrote:
> > > I'm a Windows (non C++) software developer and I'm wanting my software to
> > > run under Wine as best as possible.  My app uses CHM help files which are
> > > displayed in Windows when pressing F1 or clicking Help on the menu, but
> > > it does not work under Wine on Linux.  It does absolutely nothing.
> > >
> > > Is see there are CHM viewers available but Wine does not seem to use
> > > them. Any suggestions?
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Ross.
> > I've run into the same problem... simply put I can't install Visual
> > Basic Pro in WINE.  So I had to opt for VMWARE and run VB in a Windows
> > XP sandbox.  You can check it out here:  www.vmware.com
> >
> > You'll wanna take interest in vmplayer for Linux.  It's what I use.  I
> > have to wait a bit for the player to come up but it's great for the apps
> > I can't use in WINE.
> >
> > Take Care,
> > Jeff
>
>         I think VirtualBox (its free!), especially with Seamless Mode turned on, is
> good alternative to VMWare and much better than VMPlayer. See
> http://www.virtualbox.org/ .
>         But hey, this has nothing to do with WINE! And with CHM files too... It is
> much simpler to run CHM-viewer than virtual machine. And of course most of
> real-world users will not use virtual machines at all. So if you are
> developer and want to see your application working on Linux for users (not
> just you) you can use WINE or port it natively (sometimes very hard
> especially if your are using non-standard languages or non-standard language
> features; by saying "standard" here I mean GCC). So in many cases WINE is the
> only choice.
>         Let's face it: we really need someone who can and want implement better
> support for help files in WINE. Currently it is far from perfect. Not sure
> should be it proposed for 1.0 release or not. This can delay 1.0 release a
> lot if no one will working on it! Therefore there is no point to make it 1.0
> release requirement: just because there isn't enough people who want to work
> on it! Don't get me wrong! There is some people who did a lot of work for
> better help support in WINE. But a lot of work still should be done to make
> it really good in all (or at least most) cases.
>         You may ask: "Why? Many users use help in Windows applications!". Yes, this
> is correct. But:
>
>         1) Most developers either havn't enough time to work on this issue or simply
> think that there is more important tasks (and this is true, good help support
> isn't high priority task).
>         2) There is very simple workarounds. Instead of viewing help files directly
> user can run external viewer. In case of CHM kchmviewer should work well.
> This isn't perfect solution of course: even worse, it isn't solution at all,
> it is just an workaround.
>         3) Situation isn't very bad. In many programs help works perfectly! For
> example, HTML help in Photoshop CS. However, in many other programs it still
> doesn't work or work very bad (depending on what format and its features the
> application in question uses) and this is exactly the problem.
>
>         What's the conclusion? We need someone who can and want (actively) to work on
> this part of WINE to make it better. And this isn't one-day project, this may
> took weeks or months of work.
>

No it won't.  HTML Help (hhctrl.ocx) is implemented enough so that you
can view chm files.  The right advice is to tell Ross to open a bug
report for this problem.  Most developers don't scour the wine-users
mailing list searching for bugs to fix, and really, this isn't the
place to discuss problems like this.

-- 
James Hawkins