Converting CHM books

[will3]

I was googling for an open source .CHM to .PDF converter and was pointed to your Calibre as having a format converter that included .CHM to .PDF.

Installation of latest (0.48.48) Calibre straightforward, no questions as to formats. However, when I 'Added' the .CHM Book I wanted to convert, it just invoked the primitive Windows 'HTML Help' applet that is part of Win7 - no different than clicking on a .CHM directly from Explorer !!!

With the imported .CHM shown in the list, I clicked 'Convert Books'. Altered default o/p format from ePUB to PDF.. The i/p .CHM was 5.9MB, but o/p PDF only 297KB -far too small. All it had was the 'ToC' from the source file, i.e just a few pages, not the 690 pages of the complete source.

I tried again, this time using default o/p format EPUB. Same result.

I tried again using a small 1.28MB CHM. This produced a 5.3MB PDF - but also badly converted.
Finally tried CHM>HTMLZ - same result !

Just in case anyone thinks the source CHM is corrupted, it works perfectly using the MS Windows HTML viewer

Reason I want to convert to PDF is for easy emailing of selected pages to be printed on a remote printer - and I found PDF is the easiest format for non-technical people to print from.

I found the Windows HTML Help Viewer inadequate in 2 respects: its Print function very primitive - a) doesnt allow one to select a page range for printing, b) doesnt seem to recognise my installed default Print Driver: 'CutePDF Writer' - just presents me with a 'Add Printer' dialog. Even the simplest of non-MS programs I use are able to recognise the default Printer Driver without asking me to install it again !!

As Foxit can easily generate a user defined selection of pages into a new PDF file using my CutePDF Print Driver, I thought all I need now is a CHM2PDF converter - that ACCURATELY converts CHM to PDF, and problem solved.

Is there anything I can do to help Calibre CHM converter to work better ?

I read (manual.calibre-ebook.com/conversion) you use a system of i/p & o/p plugins, saw much that requires good knowledge of html (don't have), but no simple instruction on improving CHM conversions. Is there a set of recommended Settings to 'tune' the Calibre CHM i/p plugin ?

Searching more Calibre links took me to: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/CHM; does anyone know if using 'chmdeco' is worthwhile ? My end objective, is to be able to 'print' typically 1 chapter from a sizeable 500+page CHM technical documents, i.e formatted & hyperlinkded ToC, Chapters, text diagrams, index.

When googling chm to pdf saw lists of other utilities, some commercial, with some negative comments about conversion quality. The idea of a 'compiled' HTML format' where all the 1,000's of tiny sub-files are in a zipper for easy emailing/interchange always sounded attractive to me - I could never understand why the W3C didnt define one, left it to late-to-the-web-closed-shop-MS to define a proprietary one, by all accounts poorly documented. Is this the reason Calibre is converting it badly ?

Finally, having written this offline (travelling, dont always have internet) I then looked for Calibre Support to post this, only to discover a few other threads stating also that standard Calibre is u/s for CHM2other, 2 suggesting use something else to convert CHM to HTML, but giving no indepth, yet simple solution to the problem. From those posts it is clear what all CHM users need is an article giving clear step-by-step instructions on the best way for non-programmers to convert a CHM source to another format.

I thank you for any help in advance