myfreeer
Replacement for HTML Help Workshop
In the prerequisites, you list HTML Help Workshop:
However there is no alternative for HTML Help Workshop from Microsoft (for chm based help).
But meanwhile the MS page responds with “Error 404 - Not found” and you have to go to archive.org for it. But you might be interested to learn that there is an alternative that I found in the Lazarus project. The free and open-source Lazarus IDE is delivered together with help in CHM format generated by a command line tool named chmcmd.exe, which can run independently, i.e., has no dependencies on other Lazarus libraries or tools.
In a Lazarus installation, the binary is located in [lazarus]\fpc\3.2.2\bin\x86_64-win64\chmcmd.exe, the source code can be found in [lazarus]\fpc\3.2.2\source\packages\chm\src\*.
See htmlhelp compiler - Lazarus wiki to find out more.
Of course, I can't give any guarantees, but I found that it does a better job in compiling my HPP projects to CHM files.
Glad to hear that found this open source alternative to the hhc.exe tool.
After some experiments with the chmcmd, it emits a lot of warning, and completed with ~2.95x time compared to hhc.
The compiled file and the chmcmd tool are attached below.
chmcmd-lazarus-3.8-fpc-3.2.2-win64.zip
Thanks @myfreeer for testing the replacement. I didn't compare the timing though, as my projects are very small compared to cppreference, but it I was happy to see that the output sizes are comparable. In my case, the warnings issued by chmcmd.exe were actually helpful in fixing bugs in the actual help projects. I therefore think it is possible that they could also prove useful for this project. I also received a return value from hhc.exe that was irritating for GNU Make.