uChmViewer

This is a fork of the kchmviewer with some improvements.

• Overview
• What’s new
• Features
• Getting uChmViewer
• Usage
• Thanks
• License

Overview

KchmViewer is a chm (MS HTML help file format) and epub viewer, written in C++. Unlike most existing CHM viewers for Unix, it uses Trolltech Qt widget library, and does not depend on KDE or GNOME. It has full KDE Framework 5 support.

The main advantage of KchmViewer is extended support for non-English languages. Unlike others, KchmViewer in most cases correctly detects chm file encoding, correctly shows tables of context of Russian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese help files. It also correctly searches text in non-English help files, including Korean, Chinese and Japanese.

KchmViewer is written by Georgy Yunaev, and is licensed under GNU GPL license version 3.

What’s New

Thanks to Manuele Grueff, the Italian translation has been completely updated. Thanks to oltolm several bugs have been fixed.

Read more in the release note and in the news.

Features

• Standalone viewer, depends on Qt 5 or Qt 6 only. Does not require KDE, GNOME or wxWidgets toolkit.
• Could be optionally built with KDE Framework 5 support, using KDE dialogs.
• Completely safe and harmless. JavaScript can be disabled in the settings, optionally warns you before opening an external web page, or switching to another help file.
• Correctly detects and shows encoding of any valid chm file.
• Correctly shows non-English chm files, including Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese and others.
• Correctly searches in non-English chm files using chm built-in search index.
• Shows an appropriate image for every TOC entry.
• Has complete chm index support, including multiple index entries, cross-links and parent/child entries in index.
• Persistent bookmarks support. Allows to store bookmarks even if “Favorites” window was not enabled for this chm file. Also stores the screen position for every bookmark. You can also edit/delete bookmarks.
• For any opened chm file, stores the last opened window, search history, bookmark history, font size and so on, so when you open this file again, everything is always on the place.
• Has easy and powerful search-in-page support.
• Allows to increase or decrease the font size, so physically handicapped people can read texts easily.
• Has standard Back/Forward/Home navigation.
• Can print the opened pages on a standard printer (usually via CUPS).
• Has complex search query support. You can use search queries like “lazy people” +learn -not.

Getting uChmViewer

Binary builds for Debian, Ubuntu and Windows are available on the release page.You can also build the application yourself by following the build instructions. In addition, thanks to Андрей Алыпов (AndnoVember), RPM packages for OpenSuse are available.

Usage

Usage of uChmViewer is simple:

uchmviewer mychmfile.chm

for the rest of command-line options, see uchmviewer –help

Thanks

Thanks to:

• Jed Wing, the author of CHMLib. This library is used by kchmviewer to access chm content.
• Razvan Cojocaru, the author of xCHM. I used some ideas and chm processing code from xCHM.
• Peter Volkov for various bug reports and improvement suggestions.
• All the users, who report bugs, and suggest features. You help making kchmviewer better.

License

uChmViewer is distributed under GNU GPL license version 3.