How to view CHM files in Ubuntu?
17 Answers
xChm Viewer ![Install xchm]()
Install the xChm Viewer for viewing CHM files:
sudo apt-get install xchmchmsee is no longer available in Ubuntu, as it is no longer being maintained. Here is the announcement on the project site:
Stop maintain
ChmSee is not being developed anymore.
I haven't read CHM documents more than a year, new and update IT books are pdfs or epubs, so it's right time to end this chm viewer.
chmsee ![Install chmsee]()
sudo apt-get install chmseeapt-cache --names-only search chmgives several results.
2kchmViewer ![Install kchmviewer]()
The main advantage of kchmviewer is the best support for non-English languages. Unlike other viewers, kchmviewer in most cases is able to correctly detect the chm file encoding and show it. It correctly shows the index and table of context in Russian, Spanish, Romanian, Korean, Chinese and Arabic help files, and with new search engine is able to search in any chm file no matter what language it is written.
I like the reader that comes with wine! (hh.exe?)
Open hh.exe that comes with wine and browse for your CHM file from it, or supply it as a command line argument:
$ wine /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/wine-development/fakedlls/hh.exe WindowsHalp.chm
Use browser extensions
What could be better than a web-browser to view web-pages?
CHMFox is an excellent CHM file reader. It is much better than all the third party programs that others are suggesting, which are mostly lacking many web-browser capabilities that Firefox and alike have.
I initially suggested the CHM reader extension for Firefox, but it isn't actively maintained anymore.
4As an alternative, since the CHM format is not very popular you can convert it to PDF using chm2pdf:
sudo apt-get install chm2pdf
chm2pdf --webpage your.chmThis will produce a your.pdf file. As an alternative you can use the --book or --continuous options instead of --webpage; more info here
Also a plugin called CHM Reader exists for Firefox.
In addition to the Firefox extension(s), there's a neat Chrome app called Chumium that does the job.
extract_chmLib does a very good job of converting chm (compiled html) files into htm format. It is in the Ubuntu repository in the package libchm-bin.
extract_chmLib maintains the full functionality of the original.. However, I did need to rename files to lowercase, for one .chm (becaue chm is a Windows format which is not case-sensitive like Linux), but the overall result is ideal for me...
Here are a couple of links...
- How to convert CHM files under Linux (The Mad Philosopher)
- Convert chm to pdf or MS word or open office word processor?
Calibre is a library manager that can read all sorts of book formats, CHM included.
In Ubuntu Software Center you can do a search for "chm" (no quotes) and find some decent chm viewers.
However, while using them, I'm always missing the scaling features in firefox (to make everything bigger - not just fonts).
Therefore, my favorite CHM viewer is Firefox itself via the ChmFox extension.
sudo apt-get install kchmviewerThis worked for me on Ubuntu 16.04
1There are a lot of CHM readers. You can find them in Software Center. Just type chm.
I prefer GnoCHM.
2By default ubuntu doesn't provide any chm reader.
If you have installed wine, then by default it provides one package named hh.
- Right click on file.
- Open with wine
- Just select hh as default option it shows and select
Sumatra PDF can display .chm files also. Although, Sumatra PDF is a Windows program, you can just download the "portable version" and run it under Wine.
