Igor Yalovoy's Weblog

Many people find chm format very useful and use html help workshop to create chm files. But it can be not very obvious how to add flash movies. Actually chm file is archive. If you change it extension to zip and open, you will see, something like this.

Chm Structure

Let’s say, you have some html page and you want to insert flash movie at it. I assume, that you will have html markup similar to this:

But this will not work, because html help workshop will not add you flash movie (Some.swf) to chm file. You can check this using chm file as archive. It is reasonable question, why images are automatically added to chm files, but flash files are not? A suppose chm format wasn’t designed to display flash content.
So, we need to add flash content to chm file, but there is no way to specify for html help workshop which files should be added except htm files. But we know, that images, css and javascript files used in htm files are added automatically to resulted chm file. This leads to simple trick.

<img src="/Flash/Some.swf" style="visibility:hidden;" />

This will enforce html workshop help to add Some.swf to resulted chm file. Html help workshop doesn’t check extension of file, so you can add any desired content. Style “visibility:hidden” prevents image from displaying. That is all! Have fun!