I'm teaching a class the other day and I realize that I need my students to read a passage from an old eBook I've got... the book is way out of print and I really only wanted them to look at a page or two. At first I just printed the pages I wanted using PDFCreator. Then I'm looking over the book later and realizing that I'd like for them to see a couple of other sections, and wouldn't it be nice for students to be able to look at the Glossary?

I know, I know... I could just give them a copy of the CHM file that the eBook comes in, but, then they have to load the eBook, navigate it... just takes too much time to tell them what to do to find the info I want them to have. Then I remembered an article I stumbled on a while back on How to convert CHM files under Linux and an idea struck. Why not just post the eBook on my classroom Intranet server?

From the comments and the article I discovered two ways to do just that. I did try both methods and found KchmViewer to be extremely easy to use. The KchmViewer method did seem to produce files that were substantially larger, but, since I was only posting this on my Intranet server, I wasn't really concerned about file size. So, I've got the HTML files loaded on my web server and I'm ready to go, but, wait... there is no main index page for the eBook. Yes, the files are all there, but, they can be hard to interpret where to start since the pages are labeled things like 00co1a.htm. Hmmm... a little Googling found tree.pl.

Geek factor quotient increases here... this Perl script can only be run from a command line, and only if your Linux server (mine runs CentOS) has Perl installed. But, wow... this script runs through each file in the directory you just created and creates an Index page that lists the Title of the page and automatically creates a link to each page! A sample of a page created by this script can be found here.

So... that's what gave me a complete HTML version of an eBook in my collection. Just because I think it's kind of neat to do.

UPDATE:
I had to revisit this topic when my server's HDD crashed, so, I went back to that same article and discovered a new comment about arCHMage. This one blew me away... kept the left side menu and makes a really nicely finished final product. You can view example of decompressed CHM file here (document is in Cyrillic).