Win98banter - View Single Post - Wextech Papertrail (Or other HLP file disassembler.)

**Lostgallifreyan** · February 11th 12, 11:17 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion

"Bill in Co" wrote in news:7ICdnS-
:

Lostgallifreyan wrote:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote in
:

Sometimes I wish someone would just give me the answer. I would if
asked. Saves time letting them hang themselves reaching for un-needed
complexity, or wondering if a thing ever worked right. As a kid I
learned best from breaking

Any good teacher will say it's better to guide you until you find the
answer for yourself; you'll be much more satisfied, and know _why_ it's
the answer as well as just what the answer is.

snip

So just out of curiosity, what was the upshot of all this, since I've lost
track?
Is there any converter app (for Win9x or XP) that can fully convert a .HLP
file into a .CHM file *and* preserve the layouts and images, etc? (Not a
.RTF file, but a real CHM file, that is just as good as the original .HLP
file).

Maybe, but not directly as far as I know. That late answer to my own first
post in this thread shows my best shot at it. Converting to intermediate HTML
is a great move, it allows a good way to manually corect errors in originals
before conversion.

I didn't get the full contents/index copied over, and I'm not sure if this is
just my ignorance of the finer points, or if there are unresolved links I can
do nothing about. The process did report several. It will be a while before I
know if actual data got chopped out too, I'll be using the otiginal in
parallel with the CHM if in doubt, until I trust the CHM. The CHM itself is
real enough, I'm just unsure how complete it is. Any flaws may not be due to
method, they're more likely to to something the decompiler couldn't follow.
As it's apparently the best HLP decompiler, I'll live with it.