WINE already comes with a very very basic WinHelp program, but it needs several large pieces of work done before it'd be useful:
- Implementation of HLP95EN, or at least Dynalink support in HLPFILE_AddParagraph to call and process results from a native HLP95EN.dll
- Basic MACRO support
- CHM support, which is what most recent method of bundling help. CHM is basically a bundle of HTML files, which makes things slightly easier...
Basic CHM format is documented here, along with a GPL'ed extraction program (Which didn't work last time I tried it, but looks sound in theory): http://www.speakeasy.org/~russotto/chm/
Again, like the external dependency on CabExtract, this would rely on either someone managing to get a relicensed version of a LZX decompressor... or writing one of their own.
- Ender
On 8 Nov 2002, Mike Hearn wrote:
Date: 08 Nov 2002 13:19:28 +0000 From: Mike Hearn m.hearn@signal.qinetiq.com To: dpaun@rogers.com Cc: Wine Devel wine-devel@winehq.com Subject: Re: Help support
I think the problem with that (last time I checked) was that nobody had completely reverse engineered the message protocol between the WinHelp api calls and the winhelp app. I think there is an exchange of undocumented messages, but this is just going from what I've read on bugzilla and the lists.
BTW, how would Wine get WinHelp? Is help something that would only work if you had a real windows installation to get the exe from? Or is building a winhelp interpreter on the todo list?
thanks -mike
On Fri, 2002-11-08 at 12:43, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
Another on for the 0.9 TODO: -- launching Help from apps
This does not work now, IIRC. It's rather 'simple', and visible from the user POV, so needs fixing IMO.
-- Dimi.