Platform Independent, Searchable Info On CDROM?

Knuckles asks: "A friend of mine, who is an ethnologist, needs to author a CD-ROM with ethnographic source material (4,500 printed pages) on the indigenous population of Mexico. The CD-ROM should provide a platform independent way to retrieve the information with a simple interface and be fully searchable. He is computer literate but doesn't know anything about programming. What solution would you propose? I thought of HTML, but am lost on the question of searchability. Macromedia Director or similar? He would prefer free software, but would use proprietary if better fit for his goals."

Comments

ASCII is Your Friend

[InitZero]

From your description, it sounds as though the content is plain text. Thus, I would keep it in generic ASCII.

As for the search interface, I'd use the whatever the operating system provides. For Windows, that would be Start->Find-Files which will allow for text-based searching. On *nix, you could use grep. I'm not sure what the Mac choice would be.

The less dense and more format neutral information is, the more likely it is to be useable in the future.

Keep it simple.

InitZero