Microsoft Compiled HTML Help
proprietary online help format, consisting of multiple HTML pages compressed into a binary file with the .chm extension
Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) is a Microsoft proprietary online help format, consisting of a collection of HTML pages, an index and other navigation tools. The files are compressed and deployed in a binary format with the extension .CHM. The format was intended to succeed Microsoft WinHelp.
Although the format was designed by Microsoft, it has been successfully reverse-engineered and is now supported by many document viewers.
History
CHM was introduced as the successor to Microsoft WinHelp with the release of Windows 95 OSR 2.5. Within the Windows NT family, the CHM file support is introduced in Windows NT 4.0 and is still supported in Windows 11.
Microsoft has announced that they do not intend to add any new features to HTML Help.
File format
Help is delivered as a binary file with the .chm extension. It contains a set of HTML files, a hyperlinked table of contents, and an index file. The file format has been reverse-engineered and documentation of it is freely available.
The file starts with bytes "ITSF" (in ASCII), for "Info-Tech Storage Format", which is the internal name given by Microsoft to the generic storage file format used for CHM files.
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This entry incorporates text from “Microsoft Compiled HTML Help” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.