I read a lot of ebooks, especially tech stuff, and, happily, most people are savvy enough to publish their ebooks in PDF format. Occasionally, however, someone finds some obscure reason or obsession to publish in CHM, Microsoft’s Compiled HTML Help file format. This was made back in the day for Windows 98, but continues to desperately cling to life (that or there’s a sole 38 year old programmer living out of his mother’s basement in Peoria who publishes all of these things – maybe i should ship him a case of mountain dew and some Fritos). Each page in the ebook is actually an html file, all of which are organized together and then compressed into a single file (.CHM file extension). Microsoft abandoned CHM in 2002 for various reasons, but here they are, tons of brand new ebooks in CHM format.
So, if you are fortunate enough to be a Mac user, what do you do with these things? Well, you can use Chmox to read them, but should you prefer to export the ebook to PDF, Chmox will only do it page by page.. yay. I found references to a program called Chimp from SpheraSoft, but both the company and the software are no longer. All of the shareware download sites like VersionTracker no longer have it, but after some Googling, I dug it up on a Russian mirror of SoftPedia.
So download Chimp.dmg and print to your heart’s content.
