Best Format And Software For Digitizing Dhamma?

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ieee23
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Joined: Wed May 13, 2015 12:40 am

Best Format And Software For Digitizing Dhamma?

Post by ieee23 »

Hi,

A friend of mine who used to lead a sutta study group is going to take the study materials he made over the years and digitize them into a PDF for others to use as a study aide for use with other books. He plans on taking the hard copy to a scanning service.

He is on a Mac and he would like the guide to be a searchable PDF.

Is PDF the best route. Is there a better format and if there is, is the software he needs EASY to learn and low cost/free?

Thanks
Whatever a bhikkhu frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of his mind. - MN 19
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waterchan
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Location: Kamaloka

Re: Best Format And Software For Digitizing Dhamma?

Post by waterchan »

PDF is the most suitable format and the industry standard for searchable, read-only professional documents. It guarantees that the document will have the same appearance across all platforms that have a PDF reader installed.

Most current word processing software can save to PDF format, but Acrobat is the standard software for creating sophisticated and professional-looking PDFs. Here are the subscription plans.
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samseva
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Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2014 12:59 pm

Re: Best Format And Software For Digitizing Dhamma?

Post by samseva »

If you want to modify the PDF files (such as for adding a table of contents, OCR), there is a very good application called PDFpen (though it is somewhat expensive). For free alternatives, there might be a few here.

If what you are looking for is a PDF application to read and annotate your files, there is a great piece of software called Skim. It is free and very well designed.
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