Availability of sTog Palace Manuscript Kanjur on CD-ROM

[Richard MAHONEY]

Dear Colleagues,

On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 04:02:44PM -0700, Jonathan Silk wrote:

> Almost exactly a year ago I had to pleasure to announce the
> availability from Gene Smith's Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center
> (TBRC) of the CD-ROM publication of the Derge Kanjur, and then
> subsequently of the Tanjur from the same printing house. (These two
> collections are, of course, still available.)
>
> Now it is once again my pleasure to announce the publication of
> their next big canon project--the sTog Palace Manuscript Kanjur on
> CD-ROM, containing pdf files scanned directly from the re-print
> edition of this so-called Western Kanjur.

I don't think that there is any doubt about the value of this
collection. My only reservation is that all digital texts seem to be
available only in Adobe Acrobat format (PDF files):

 http://www.tbrc.org/catalog/order.php

This is a little disappointing. I would have preferred the texts to
have been available in the Tag(ged) Image File Format (TIFF files):

 http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/PDFS/TN/TIFF6.pdf (specs)

TIFF images of digital texts tend to be easy to manipulate using a
wide variety of applications.

So my question is whether any readers have been able to successfully
convert TBRC PDF files into TIFF files (preferably multi-page
files). I have experimented on my BSD machine with `pdftoppm' (from
XPDF bundle) followed by `ppm2tiff' (from libtiff bundle). This does
work, but it is slow and tedious. I can imagine that this route would
soon become a nightmare if one had a good number of TBRC PDF files to
convert.

I would very much appreciate any thoughts on this issue.


Best regards,

 RBM


--
Richard MAHONEY | internet: homepages.comnet.net.nz/~r-mahoney
Littledene      | telephone / telefax (man.): ++64 3 312 1699
Bay Road        | cellular: ++64 25 829 986
OXFORD, NZ      | e-mail: r.mahoney[use"@"]comnet.net.nz