How to make a Digital Recipe Book?

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I have a big folder of recipe's that I like to work out of of. They are pages ripped out of magazines by my wife. I'd like to make a digital version of this and am looking for the best way to do that. I can think of a few options.

1. I can use http://http://http://allrecipes.com which allows recipe's to be saved including my own but there doesn't seem to be a way to print a "cookbook"

2. I could save all receipe's as text files or as simpletext which would allow the flexibility to add photo's, extreme compatibility, but would be difficult to format.

3. I could take a picture and save as a jpeg file.

I'm leaning towards number one. I can always print out the recipe's one by one as pdf's and save them on my computer. What are your thoughts?
 

RavingMac

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If you have an iPad I reccommend The Recipe Box, a pretty decent APP. On your Mac you could try MacGourmet, another decent APP.
 
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If you have a scanner you can use it and then run the file thru PDFPen to make it "searchable .pdf".

I think that is the best of both worlds i.e. you get to capture the beautiful glossy photo of the food, you do not have to type in any words and your scanned image is searchable based on the words in the recipie.
If you want to go a step further you can then put the .pdf file in a "heirarchiel" folder structure e.g. Poultry Folder, Beef Folder, Casserole Folder.

Another additional bonus is if you find a recipie on the Web you can just "Print, Save As .pdf" and you can also collect recipies from the Web into your File System. You could also run this .pdf file thru PDFPen (or any other OCR Program) and it will be "searchable" for the words from the recipie.

Lastly you have the added benefit of your Recipie System not becoming "obsolete". What I mean by that is I was stung once by using a Recipie Software Program and the company went out of business and I was left with a propriortory database that I could not use.

One other thought as an alternative, if you are kind of geeky and like databases, you could make your own database using Bento. It is easy to use, has some great database recipie templates.

Just my 2 cents
DavidH
 
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If you plan on scanning them in, then you can save the scans as PDF, upload them to Google docs and docs will do the character recognition for you
 
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What I decided to do for now is a combination of all the advice offered here. Almost all of the recipe's that I have are from food websites so I went to each and printed to pdf. I saved the documents to a dropbox folder called "recipe's" so they are available on all of my computers and ios devices. When saving from a website it does preserve the "text" from the document.

I also have some recipe's that are not from magazines and those I typed in textedit and added an image from google images. I then saved to the same folder as both a simple text file and as a pdf. That way I can edit in the future if needed.

Last, in preparation for apple's upcoming flat file system I am attempting to forgo folders as much as possible. So I didn't create a folder for each kind of recipe. I named things "Asian-Pad Phrik King" or "Dessert-Candied Pecans" etc. So the recipe's still appear in something of an organized order and are all in a single folder. I have 57 recipe's so far.

The google documents solution would probably work equally well. I used dropbox because I already had it and it seems well supported from within apps on ios.

The last part of the puzzle is now how to print it all as a cookbook and keep it in the kitchen. Three ring binder or something else?
 
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I use Paprika Recipe Manager on my Macs and iPad, it will sync them so you always have all your recipes handy. It makes it easy to organize and find or change your recipes. Also you can download the recipes you find online with a one button click. You can find it in the Mac App Store for your Mac and in the App Store for you IOS devices. You can print or email from your Mac and IOS device. I use to use MacGourmet Deluxe but their iApp is just about worthless. You may like the Mac version just for the CookBook builder built into it.
 
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What I decided to do for now is a combination of all the advice offered here. Almost all of the recipe's that I have are from food websites so I went to each and printed to pdf. I saved the documents to a dropbox folder called "recipe's" so they are available on all of my computers and ios devices. When saving from a website it does preserve the "text" from the document.

I also have some recipe's that are not from magazines and those I typed in textedit and added an image from google images. I then saved to the same folder as both a simple text file and as a pdf. That way I can edit in the future if needed.

Last, in preparation for apple's upcoming flat file system I am attempting to forgo folders as much as possible. So I didn't create a folder for each kind of recipe. I named things "Asian-Pad Phrik King" or "Dessert-Candied Pecans" etc. So the recipe's still appear in something of an organized order and are all in a single folder. I have 57 recipe's so far.

The google documents solution would probably work equally well. I used dropbox because I already had it and it seems well supported from within apps on ios.

The last part of the puzzle is now how to print it all as a cookbook and keep it in the kitchen. Three ring binder or something else?

If you use Dropbox then I would definetly look at using an iPad and installing Dropbox App on it. You will never have to use paper again.

DavidH
 

RavingMac

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I use Paprika Recipe Manager on my Macs and iPad, it will sync them so you always have all your recipes handy. It makes it easy to organize and find or change your recipes. Also you can download the recipes you find online with a one button click. You can find it in the Mac App Store for your Mac and in the App Store for you IOS devices. You can print or email from your Mac and IOS device. I use to use MacGourmet Deluxe but their iApp is just about worthless. You may like the Mac version just for the CookBook builder built into it.

I should know better than to get involved in threads like this . . . it ended up costing me $25. Looked at the Paprika APPs and ended up getting the Mac and iPad versions. Syncing is a cinch. Took me all of five minutes to export the recipes from MacGourmet, import them to Paprika and then sync to all devices.
+Rep on the reccomendation.
 
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I too use Paprika Recipe Manager. Its so easy to organize my recipes and sync them to all my devices. I use the iPad in the kitchen instead of paper. The meal plan and shopping list features are awesome. Downloading recipes from websites is a cinch. It's an app that is well worth the money. Yummysoup! Is another decent organizing app but support has been lacking lately and there's no cloud syncing to mobile devices right now.
 
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I should know better than to get involved in threads like this . . . it ended up costing me $25. Looked at the Paprika APPs and ended up getting the Mac and iPad versions. Syncing is a cinch. Took me all of five minutes to export the recipes from MacGourmet, import them to Paprika and then sync to all devices.
+Rep on the reccomendation.

I got tired of waiting on MacGourmet or Yummy soup to come up with something usable for my iPad that I went searching for something else and found Paprika. It works so well that I am going to stick with it. The only thing I would like it to add is being able to print a book, but I don't do that often and can work around it other ways.
 

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