Windows help is really just a collection of HTML pages. It shouldn't be too hard to get the book.module to write an HTML file for every page in the book, and then write Table of Contents file ... After that is complete, you can generate a Windows Help (.chm) file via the command line.

The benefit is that users can get an easy offline copy of the book which is indexed and searchable. For some people, this is preferable to the current 'one long page' which the book.module currently exports.

See Windows Help SDK at MSDN

Comments

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

I would welcome such an addition. I looked at the Drupal handbook in its
html-version last night and it is not very usefull in its current state.

We should split it into node and add an index as you suggested. Then we
should tar and gz it and send it to the user.

Cheers,
Gerhard

cel4145’s picture

cel4145 commented

Instead of using Windows help which is platform specific, why not export the book as a pdf? Would be more accessible to Linux and Mac users.

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

PDF generation is possible. Look at my pdfview module
in contrib.
Cheers,
Gerhard

puregin’s picture

puregin commented

See also http://drupal.org/node/1482. This provides XML export of books, from which it easy to burst the book into a directory tree with one content file per node, and thence generate the CHM file. Alternatively, it should be relatively easy to do this by writing proper 'visitor' callbacks for book_recurse().

puregin’s picture

puregin commented
Priority: Normal » Minor

This really should be done as a contributed module (but all of this could piggyback on existing book module functionality, see for example the printer friendly output, or export_opml modules for examples). It shouldn't be difficult to do.

Marking the priority as minor.

LAsan’s picture

LAsan commented
Version: x.y.z » 7.x-dev

Still a feature request?

moshe weitzman’s picture

moshe weitzman commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)