Daan4 / qthelpextract

Tool to extract files from Qt Compressed Help Files (*.qch).

qthelpextract

This tool can be used to convert the Qt Compressed Help File *.qch from Siemens WinCC OA to PDF.

Prerequisites

The following software must be installed on the system:

Dependency	Source	Tested Version
wkhtmltopdf	website	0.12.6

Compiling the Source Code

Compile the C# project with Visual Studio.

Using the Tool

QtCompressedHelpExtractor.exe [source-file] [target-directory]

For example if you want to export the html pages of the WinCC OA 3.14 manual:

[source-file] = "C:\Siemens\Automation\WinCC_OA\3.14\help\en_US.utf8\WinCC_OA.qch"

[target-directory] = "C:\Temp\WinCC-OA-Manual-3.14\"

How does the Tool work

*.qch files are SQLite 3 database files.

The tool extracts and decompresses the html and other files from the help file into the [target-directory].

Then, it extracts the table of content from the help file into [target-directory]\content.txt. This determines the order of the html files in the final PDF.

Last but not least, wkhtmltopdf is used to create the PDF [target-directory]\output.pdf.

The last step can take several minutes and can use several gigabytes of RAM.