Although the CHM format is not used anymore very much, and even less on Linux, there are still documents and help files which may need a dedicated application for opening these files. Kchmviewer is one of them, and it has recently been updated to version 7.1.

Kchmviewer is a CHM helper files viewer for KDE which allows to browse CHM files by chapters, increase or decrease the font size, set bookmarks, view HTML source for the current page, change text encoding, search through CHM files, edit the toolbars, and even extract the contents of the CHM file to HTML documents.

Kchmviewer has plenty of configuration options and support for changing external tools as well.

Install Kchmviewer 7.1 in Ubuntu 14.04

There doesn’t seem to be a PPA for the latest release, 7.1, but compiling is pretty easy and relatively fast.

First, install the dependencies (the source repositories should be enabled – lines that start with deb-src inside the /etc/apt/sources.list file):

Install additional dependencies:

Next, download the source tarball from SourceForge (direct link here), save it somewhere and uncompress it, e.g.:

Now change the directory to kchmviewer-7.1 and issue the following commands:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

This should be all. Type kchmviewer in a terminal to start it.

You can also install the latest Kchmviewer release in Ubuntu using UbuTricks.