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Pythonaro blog

15 August 2009

Django 1.1 help file CHM version

This is a funny story.

I happen to think Microsoft's proprietary CHM format is lovely. So I went looking for a CHM version of docs for Django, and google found it for me on this blog. I duly downloaded it, tried to to open it and... it wouldn't display. I could only see the TOC, but not the actual documents. I thought this might be a corrupted version, and it was for an alpha release of Django anyway, so I though I'd compile a version myself. After all, these docs are built with Sphinx, which apparently can generate all sorts of formats...

So here's the procedure to compile django's docs:

  1. download and install Sphinx.
    Easy_install Sphinx
    was all I needed. Hurrah for Python.
  2. Run Sphinx to generate the initial files:
    cd Django-1.1/docs
    mkdir _build/html
    %PYTHONDIR%\scripts\sphinx-build.exe -b htmlhelp -d _build\doctrees . _build\html
    
  3. Download and install Htmlhelp.exe from the Microsoft site. This will give you the HTML Help Workshop.
  4. launch the workshop, File -> Compile..., select the file Djangodoc.hhc which should now be in _build/html, and this will produce the chm.
  5. ...??? Profit!

... Then I found out the reason that downloaded CHM didn't work was a stupid patch from Microsoft. Ouch.

Anyway, if you need it, here's the file: Djangodocs 1.1 in CHM format. If it doesn't work, make sure you follow this suggested procedure, and save yourself some time...

Labels: , ,

posted by GiacomoL @ 10:19 AM  

2 Comments:

  • At 15/8/09 14:52, Blogger Giulio Piancastelli said…

    Well, nice, but it would be even more interesting to know why you think that CHM is a lovely format for deploying offline documentation.

     
  • At 15/8/09 20:41, Blogger GiacomoL said…

    The index/search/TOC combo is simply a killer, IMHO. You don't get that with simple HTML, nor with PDF.

     

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