HXK Converter

Extract text from Help index files (HXK)


Drop or upload your .HXK file
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How to extract text from your HXK file

  1. Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your HXK file.
  2. You’ll see a preview, if available.
  3. Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert HXK to another file type

To convert HXK Index files to another format, you need Help & Manual or other Developer software.

Convert a file to HXK

To convert other file formats to the "Help Index File" file type, you need software like Help & Manual or a similar tool.


About HXK files

A .HXK file is an XML document containing the index keywords for a Microsoft Help 2 project. It associates search terms with the URLs of corresponding help articles inside a compiled HXS file. These files are typically generated by help authoring tools like Help & Manual or the legacy Microsoft Help 2 Workshop (see Microsoft Help 2 on Wikipedia). The main disadvantage of the .HXK format is that the Microsoft Help 2 ecosystem is obsolete, proprietary, and lacks modern browser or OS support. Users face severe limitations because modern authoring software usually drops support for these legacy index definitions. You often need to convert or extract data from this file to salvage your keyword mapping when migrating legacy documentation to modern web formats. The best target conversion formats are XML, CSV, or TXT. Because the file consists of structured text, converting it to open data formats results in minimal data loss, though proprietary Help 2 formatting tags will be useless outside the compiler environment. This file format is difficult to process automatically because it is deeply tied to its matching HXC (project) and HXT (table of contents) files. Often, only the original software can properly read or export the combined data. However, convert.guru can still identify the file format, inspect the file, and show text or internal content. If our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded XML format, viewing or conversion may still be possible. Just drag and drop your file to see what it is and convert it if supported.

Convert.Guru analyzes your HXK file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.

Users also converted HXW, HXL and HXT files.


FAQ

If you want to convert HXK file to TMP, TEMP, CACHE, LOG, BAK, OLD, NEW, PART, DOWNLOAD, CRDOWNLOAD, LOCK or PID, you can use Help & Manual or similar software from the "Help System Keyword Indexing" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert DEVICE, CACHE, SOCK, SYMLINK, PID, MOUNT, FIFO, LOG, PIPE, TMP, JUNCTION or TEMP files to HXK, try Help & Manual or another comparable tool in the "Help System Keyword Indexing" category.



The HXK Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our HXK converter.