[request] PDFor any version of help file

[smorgasbord]

why?
so that all the occurrences of a word etc. can be searched upon
Thanks

[tank]

does that not happen with the current help file?

[smorgasbord]

i only have chm file,
i want to search all the occurrences of the word "gui" or "label" et al.
is it possible with the current chm file, i dont know i think it is not. i request that please.

[tank]

i only ever search
there is a search tab on the left hand pain.
it seems to work qyute well to me perhaps i am missing soemthing

[smorgasbord]

ohh that is seems to be it.
thanks tanks.
But still if i had the PDF file i could copy paste it to txt file then apply regex and then save all the example codes and then run them one by one, tweaking them and learning on the go.
Possible?
Thanks

[smorgasbord]

I Just stumbled upon the previous PDF that i made, uploading it if it might help someone.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dz2isr1dccbwn ... ombine.pdf
I guess PDF of latest version is alsothere, i wish someone uploaded it

[Wade Hatler]

An easy way to do that sort of thing is to decompile the help file. You can decompile any .CHM file using the -decompile switch on hh.exe. That gives you all of the original files that went into the help file, then you can do anything you want with them. I do this all the time to pull apart the index files and use them for keyword help in Visual SlickEdit.

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hh.exe -decompile C:\Temp\AhkHelpFiles C:\..path..to..ahk..\AutoHotkey.chm

In the folder you'll find Table of Contents.hhc which is the generated table of contents in pseudo-HTML format, easy to parse with Regex's. The .HHC extension is what makes it the TOC. The first part of the filename will be whatever the original designer of the help file called it.

You will also find Index.hhk, which is the index. Not all help files have an index, but if they have them it will always have an extension of hhk, and most of those I've seen have the same name. There will only be one index or TOC file.

The folder structure below that is determined by whoever made the help file. In the case of AHK file, everything is under a docs\ folder.

This trick works were almost any .CHM file, although many will be missing the index file. Most of the time, the files you're searching her ordinary HTML, so you have to search using an HTML aware searching tool.

And of course, since this is an open source project you can also just download the original source files from https://github.com/Lexikos/AutoHotkey_L-Docs.

[smorgasbord]

Wade Hatler
thanks
will try and tell tomorrow
:)

[lexikos]

Edit: I pointed out that you can download the documentation from github, but then realized that Wade already mentioned it. Why decompile the help file?

[smorgasbord]

sorry wade i cannot do it

lexikos as i wrote in the main post, i want all the occurences of "specific" words or text
could i get a pdf or txt file rather of the latest version of ahk_l
thanks

[Wade Hatler]

Lexicos: I mainly mentioned it because it's a handy trick. I've used it on a bunch of files that I didn't have source to. I did it with the AHK file a long time before I knew where the source was.

Smorgasbord: Surprised it didn't work. You can just grab the source, or if you're having trouble with hh let me know what the problem is. Note that hh is C:\Windows\system32\hh.exe, and I think the target folder has to exist before you run it. Also, you have to quote the .CHM file if it's in it's usual place.

[Morpheus]

You should be able to decompress a chm file using 7-zip.

[smorgasbord]

@all friends above
i tried but...
please upload if it is so easy for you seniors

[Wade Hatler]

Go to https://github.com/Lexikos/AutoHotkey_L-Docs and click "Download ZIP". You'll get the source in a zip file.

[smorgasbord]

@wade
done. now what to do?
thanks

[Wade Hatler]

Unzip it and search for the words. Don't really know what you're trying to do, but just unzipping to a folder and using Explorer's "Search" box will probably get you what you want. If not, you can search using any GREP tool (I like dnGrep), or write a small script to go through the files and search for words. You can find words using a RegexMatch that has "i)\b" at each end of the search, e.g. "i)\bWinActivate\b" would find all instances of WInActivate without finding words that just contain those words. The i) makes it case insensitive.

Of course, if you're just looking for all instances of particular words, you don't even have to do all that. The full text of the manual is also online at http://l.autohotkey.net/docs so you can usually just google what you want, although that doesn't give you much control over the results.

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site:http://l.autohotkey.net/docs WinActivate

And last but not least, most of the time when I want to figure out how to do something, I just google the whole AHK site. There are 2 competing sites now, so if you want to be thorough you need to do:

Code: Select all

(site:autohotkey.com | site:ahkscript.org) WinActivate

[smorgasbord]

mm.. there is so much stuff that could be done if i have a pdf/txt file
I could extract all the example codes
and run them one by one to make learning fun etc.
Thanks so much @Lexikos for this awesome language
and @Wade and all