KD Help Book

KD Help Book — a documentation reader with the look & feel of a classic desktop help viewer (an early-2010s IDE aesthetic). Period-authentic chrome, modern engine. (The CLI binary is khb, the crates are khb-core/khb-cli/khb-wasm, and a compiled docset is a .khb — a "KD Help Book". Repo: KDHelpBook/monorepo.)

Write your docs, compile them into a self-contained .khb docset (a SQLite database with a prebuilt full-text index), and read them in a fast web viewer that can merge multiple docsets into one table of contents, index, and search — the way classic help collections did.

Repository layout

This is a monorepo with three parts:

Path	What it is
compiler/	Rust Cargo workspace — the data engine. Crates: core (format, queries, SQLite + FTS5, streaming VFS, .khbb converter — compiled to native and wasm), cli (the khb command), wasm (browser bindings).
viewer-ts/	Vite + TypeScript viewer — UI only, backed by the wasm core.
docs/	The .khb format specification and the compiler manual.

The viewer-ts app began as a single-file HTML prototype (help-viewer.html, documented in HANDOFF.md); that prototype has been removed now that the viewer reached parity — it remains in the project's git history.

Desktop (Tauri)

The viewer runs unchanged inside a Tauri window for an offline desktop app — see docs/desktop.md.

Formats

• .khb — a SQLite docset ("Help Book"). The form queried at runtime.
• .khbb — a minimal binary (no prebuilt indexes) that the viewer rebuilds into a .khb in the browser (via wasm) and caches. Smallest download.
• .khba — a sidecar attachments file (images and downloads) for a .khb. Attachments can also be embedded directly in the .khb; one docset may have several .khba packs.
• .gz suffix — any of the above may be gzip-compressed for smaller transfer (foo.khb.gz, foo.khba.gz), decompressed in-browser with the native DecompressionStream.

Quick start

# 1. Build the compiler and produce the demo docsets
cd compiler
cargo run -p khb-cli -- compile examples/en -o examples.en.khb

# 2. Run the viewer (dev)
cd ../viewer-ts
npm install
npm run dev

Distribution

The first release is distributed through GitHub Releases, not crates.io. Download the archive for your platform from the latest release, extract it, and place the khb executable somewhere on your PATH. The khb-core, khb-cli, and khb-wasm workspace crates are implementation packages and are not currently published to crates.io; in particular, cargo install khb-cli is not an installation channel.

khb pack assembles a ready-to-host static distribution (viewer + docsets + a docsets.json manifest); khb patch updates an already-built one without rebuilding the viewer. Two profiles:

• reader — the general viewer: users can open/upload other docsets; PWA on.
• bundled --lock — a single product's docs, external sources disabled, PWA off.

Host the result on any static host (e.g. GitHub Pages), or wrap it in Tauri for an offline desktop app (the same Rust core runs natively there).

Verifying release downloads

Each GitHub release includes a SHA256SUMS manifest. Download it alongside the archive or .khb file you want to verify, then run:

# Linux
sha256sum --check --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS

# macOS
shasum --algorithm 256 --check --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS

On Windows, open PowerShell in the download directory, set the downloaded file name, and compare its calculated checksum with the manifest:

$file = "khb-vX.Y.Z-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip"
$expected = (Select-String -Path SHA256SUMS -Pattern "  $([regex]::Escape($file))$").Line.Split(' ')[0]
if ((Get-FileHash $file -Algorithm SHA256).Hash -eq $expected) { "OK" } else { throw "SHA-256 mismatch" }

License

MIT © 2026 Krystian Duma