HtmlHelp status, winecfg and SoC proposal

Jacek Caban jacek at codeweavers.com
Sun Mar 4 16:22:30 CST 2007


Hello.

As you may have noticed, I've been working on HtmlHelp lately. Currently 
it should generally work, but still there is a lot to do. HTML should be 
correctly displayed and content tab should work. I was thinking about 
making more use of it in Wine. I think winecfg could benefit from it. We 
could easily add context help to winecfg using HtmlHelp API. Even just 
integrating a part of Wine User's Guide would be a good start. The main 
problem is building chm file (that is the file format of HtmlHelp). 
Microsoft has a HtmlHelp compiler (hhc) for it. We'd need something 
similar  in Wine. AFAIK there is no good open source replacement. 
HtmlHelp maker (hhc, see [1]) doesn't create internal files (parts of 
chm that describes stuff like index or default topic) and it's GPLed so 
it's useless for Wine (unless author would relicense it for us). I think 
it would be a good project for Google Summer of Code. The task would be 
to write a hhc replacement and add a help option to winecfg. hhc 
replacement (say whhc) would have to be a plain UNIX tool (it means a 
bit of code duplication with itss.dll, just like we do in widl) so we 
could use it during compilation. I think its difficulty is good for SoC. 
Compressing code may be integrated from some other project. The 
remaining parts are code of parser of files describing chm and a little 
winecfg hacking. What do you think?

Jacek

[1] http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/hhm



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