Windows Help files - what are the options?

HTML would be the next best choice, ONLY IF you would serve them from a public web server. If you tried to bundle it with your app, all the files (and images (and stylesheets (and ...) ) ) would make CHM look like a gift from gods.

That said, when actually bundled in the installation package, (instead of being served over the network), I found the CHM files to work nicely.

OTOH, another pitfall about CHM files: Even if you try to open a CHM file on a local disk, you may bump into the security block if you initially downloaded it from somewhere, because the file could be marked as "came from external source" when it was obtained.

I don't like the html option, and actually moved from plain HTML to CHM by compressing and indexing them. Even use them on a handful of non-Windows customers even.It simply solved the constant little breakage of people putting it on the network (nesting depth limited, strange locking effects), antivirus that died in directories with 30000 html files, and 20 minutes decompression time while installing on an older system, browser safety zones and features, miscalculations of needed space in the installer etc.

And then I don't even include the people that start "correcting" them, 3rd party product with faulty "integration" attempts etc, complaints about slowliness (browser start-up)

We all had waited years for the problems to go away as OSes and hardware improved, but the problems kept recurring in a bedazzling number of varieties and enough was enough. We found chmlib, and decided we could forever use something based on this as escape with a simple external reader, if the OS provided ones stopped working and switched.

Meanwhile we also have an own compiler, so we are MS free future-proof. That doesn't mean we never will change (solutions with local web-servers seem favourite nowadays), but at least we have a choice.

Our software is both distributed locally to the clients and served from a network share. We opted for generating both a CHM file and a set of HTML files for serving from the network. Users starting the program locally use the CHM file, and users getting their program served from a network share has to use the HTML files.

We use Help and Manual and can thus easily produce both types of output from the same source project. The HTML files also contain searching capabilities and doesn't require a web server, so though it isn't an optimal solution, works fine.

So far all the single-file types for Windows seems broken in one way or another:

• WinHelp - obsoleted
• HtmlHelp (CHM) - obsoleted on Vista, doesn't work from network share, other than that works really nice
• Microsoft Help 2 (HXS) - this seems to work right up until the point when it doesn't, corrupted indexes or similar, this is used by Visual Studio 2005 and above, as an example