Repurposing Content

There are software tools for just about anything these days.  One class of tools lets users like you and me convert a CHM into other formats including, not surprisingly, PDF. Sure, you could grab a copy of most of the BizTalk Server 2006 documentation from the Developer Center (a zip that contains a PDF for each major bucket under the root doc node) and get down to PDF'ing quickly. It doesn't contain everything (the SDK is omitted), but does contain the major buckets including Getting Started, Developing, etc. Even though it is a few months old, it is still reasonably fresh. You could grab this file, dump one of the PDF's to your Windows CE-capable phone, and head out for some quality offline reading. Or print a few hundred pages.

Or you could grab some software and convert choice topics into your own custom CHM. If this is appealing, you could cobble together your own solution using some open source goodness, Word 2007 and some c# -- mix it all up in a pot like gumbo -- and convert CHM's with your own tech. By doing it yourself, you could take CHM topics (they are HTML inside the CHM), run your own XSL transform against them to remove header/footer and other stuff you don't want, override the CSS if the mood strikes you, then run it through Word with the PDF export and weave together some custom stuff. PDF stuff. Or XPS stuff. Whatever.

If the latter appeals to you -- a guerilla tool for converting CHM's -- what features would you expect?  What kind of UI would make it happy to use? I tend to write tools like this to be command-line driven or they can be batched up and then duct-taped to other processes in a workflow. I don't do UI's. But if this were "Project UI", what would you look for?

Look for bits sometime soon.