Best use of this site

Greetings,

This page will give you the tools to make the most of this site. The best way to make use of the treasures of this site is to download the very large PDF files locally to your computer.

They are also quite large some are over 50 megs, with an average 20 megs per book (300 pages). Also if you are trying to download these books make sure that you have a good connection to the internet. If you are using anything less than high speed access (dsl, adsl, Cable, or other Broadband connection) do not try to download the large files, they will take hours. However if you want it that bad you are in for a long wait.

There are programs that help with downloading and I do believe the website has a facility that allows these programs to pick up where they left off (e.g flashget). If you do use these please do not try to download the entire website at once and in one day. The hosting company will take me to the cleaners or worst the site will be down for everyone. It has happend before thanks to some uncool dudes! Just don’t do it!

I am assuming that you are at a facility that has high speed access and downloading thes large files is not an issue. Should you have any problems with the site do e-mail me. I try to reply to e-mails that are sent about site issues.

Concerning bibliography I try my best to list the complete information on an article but if you can not find it do let me know and I’ll try to find it and update the site.

Utilities:

  • How to do Arabic in Windows (new) by. aH. Madhany. Also in pdf. (links)

  • Minipad: Arabic Text processor. (link)
  • Need help with citations, see Internet Citation Guide. (link)

  • A reader is needed for PDF files and it is available free of charge from Adobe. (link)

  • Need help with pdf files, see Acrobat help for PDF files (link)
  • A reader is needed for Word files and it is available free of charge from Microsoft. (link)

  • Date Converter. Hijri to AD and vice versa. (local)

  • Convert to/from Roman Numeral to/from Decimal. (local)
  • I have a detailed listing of the books in Arabic that are on this website with the links to them and complete with full bibilographic information. The list was last updated on 18-05-2007. It has 124 volumes a minority of which are on our sister website: muslimphilosophy.com . (Excel file) list  
  • To download any files PDF or word:
    1. Right-click (Mac users Click-and-hold) anywhere on the link.
    2. Choose ‘Save Target As’.
    3. Choose a location to save the file, then click ‘Save’.

Why PDF’s:

At this time many of the books that are available on the site is in PDF format. PDF is a nice format or way of organizing a file very much like a book. I have settled on making facimile of the original book.

This way the reader will have the exact text that was printed. In very few cases I’ll have the digitized version of the work as well. In the digitized versions I try my best to have the text as accurate as humanly possible. However to be absolutley sure check with the facimile of the book.

Since I started working with PDF’s scanner’s have improved in quality and I have learned to make better use of pdf file features. As with the recently scanned work I strive to improve the quality of the scans and experience for the user (like matching page numbers where possible, Book marks to create links to different parts of the work).

On some works I have even linked multiple volumes together. I always try to have the copyright page of each work this way the reader can track back to the exact edition used.

Cheers,

mh