Adding syllable-rhymes level bookmarks to the Myanmar Dictionary

 
My last post described the creation of bookmarks for each page of the body-text of the dictionary. The headwords in a Myanmar language dictionary and the word list in a Myanmar language spelling book are arranged alphabetically by syllable-rhymes. The detailed explanation of the concept of the Myanmar language syllable-rhymes could be found in the first volume of the Abridged Myanmar Language Dictionary published by the Myanmar Language commission in 1978.

Adding child level bookmarks to each page of dictionary

Adding the bookmarks for each page of the dictionary is straight forward with the use of the JPdfBookmarks software. But there was a problem while I tried adding children bookmarks to each page of the dictionary. For that I need to zoom-in the pages to be able to mark the location of the syllable-rhymes and in doing so the text became blurred and unreadable.
However, I was able to solve this problem by importing the dictionary in PDF format to GIMP software and converting the pages from a gray-scale format to 2-bit black-white format so that the text is still readable with zooming.

2-bits image format for the dictionary is not so good

After I had added syllable-rhymes level bookmarks to the dictionary in 2-bits image format PDF, I found that the quality of the pages so obtained wasn’t as good as the original gray-scale image PDF. So I transferred the bookmarks data to a gray-scale scanned PDF dictionary file. It was not the original scanned PDF file with 22-MB file size. I reduced it to about half the file size by converting to 300 dpi in LibreOffice Draw, without much loss in quality.

With that, most of the bookmarks fit in at the right location, but considerable number of them needed to be modified manually with JPdfBookmarks and that was tedious. Anyway, it was done!

The resulting dictionary (vol. 1) is shared

With timidity and hesitation, I am sharing the bookmarked PDF file of the Abridged Myanmar Dictionary, volume-1 here.

At the beginning, I just found the complete set of four volumes of the Dictionary on Facebook and had downloaded it. Timid because I don’t know anything of the implications (or not) about the copy right issues with this book. Nevertheless, I’m undertaking this exercise in good faith. I guess the possibility of such a quick and dirty, DIY, digital solution to finding words in the context of an extremely complex alphabetical ordering of words would be appealing to our friends.