Pali Text Reader / News: Recent posts

Dear friends in the Dhamma,

Some of you may have already noticed that the VRI institute has come out with a new version of its famous CST3 program (which served as a model for our own development of the PTR).

The new CST4 developed by Frank Snow is - like the PTR - a desktop application written in C# but unfortunately no open source program (yet)!

If you too think that it would make more sense for the VRI to release their free software to the open public and thus synergize development and enhance feature richness in having one common pali reader and analysis tool, please consider sending them an email! The more people voice their appreciation for such a step, the more likely it will become.... read more

The new version released at January 28 has been documented. See the updated documentation at http://palireader.sourceforge.net/ppc.html

Fixed bugs:
1. when user taps on a bookmark name and renames it, the new name was not remembered.
2. OK button in the right-top corner of the window was visible in the "select book" dialog. Tapping it caused the application to freeze.
3. CSCD formatting codes appear in the names of some texts in the "select book" dialog (Jataka atthakatha etc).... read more

We are happy to announce the Pali Text Reader's first BETA release (version 0.1.1.38)

For a full list of added features/functionality see the accompanying change notes in the download section.

Thanks to all of you, who sent bug reports / hints and help requests...

Our project is now accessible through Sourceforge SVN service. The old CVS version is no longer available. Besides, to facilitate easier builds, a nant build file governs the entire build process. So, if you want to have a look at the current up to date PTR, checkout sources and run "nant" on the master.build file... thats it!
Some early beta features like highlighting and a google like automatic word translation are already available - of course, everyone is invited to "push the limits". ... read more

We just uploaded palireader setup version 0.0.9.9 - This will be the last Pali Text Reader dubbed "Alpha". There have been lots of improvements since the last setup which went online about 6 weeks ago.

Here are some "new" or improved items:

.)Preliminary dotLucene integration. Searching in the Tipitaka with the fastest open source search engine. Scored result ranking (yet limited to 10 highest hits) and direct opening of relevant books. There is also a classic (CSCD like) search in progress, which will also display frequencies of occurences and position information...)
.)improved design and look-up mechanism of the free pali-english-pali dictionary,
.)All Tipitaka books are now mapped and thus available from the book selection menu - by the way, the book selection has been greatly enhanced (also visually) - allowing custom information for each book - (there is still work left - if you want to write short informative text to some of the books, let me know)
.)a font&page settings plugin - momentarily not much more than a proof of concept but eventually it will govern the style sheet information and thus allow a very flexible display of the Pali Texts
.)...which themselves have been re-formatted (there is an offline formatting tool now, which allows conversion of CSCD texts into html) thus reducing time for opening texts and allowing some time consuming "artistic" effects on the texts which however, make the read nicer (like page information or alternative readings) -
.)custom context menu already displays some of the features to come in BETA phase. However, you already are able to select pali words and can search for them in the dictionary via the context menu.
.)nice too: copy and convert selected passages to Velthuis - this easy and quick transliteration makes it very simple to share your readings with friends who have no fonts/applications supporting unicode
.)as we talk about unicode: the installer will install a beautiful free unicode font on your computer as well: Times Roman Extended - this is set as the default font for reading (just have a look at the style sheet in the "WORK" directory...
.)This release has been tested on Windows XP (SP1 and SP2)... read more

The newest release comes with a fully functional dictionary based on Ven. Buddhadatta's free Pali-English and English-Pali dictionary. Over 21000 entries (all editable) can be looked up automatically. New (custom) entries can be added - if necessary also deleted. Dictionary format is open and text-based (not binary).
Besides the dictionary there are lots of minor changes - see the change log for details.

Some more weeks have passed and our dear Pali Text Reader project is yet not mature enough to be dubbed "BETA". However, there are basicly only two more steps to be taken and we can issue a first beta version: The book selector plugin has to allow access to all CSCD books (only a view are mapped right now - if you select others they wont open) and our search plugin (DotLucene seems to be the search engine at hand) has to work. By the way, new alpha release is out, for the eager ones to see for themselves. Check out the new screenshots on the dictionary plugin and TwoPageViewer! The 0.0.9.4 release will solve several bugs and problems reported by Alan McClure (thanks Alan!). Its still experimental and should spark interest rather than be a working tool...

After a few months of "rest" the Pali Text Reader project is back on track. You probably already figured out that it is part of Sourceforge now. If not, you may want to check out the screenshot section there first. I have evenly distributed the entire development up to the first stable release into four seperate milestones. The Pali Text Reader has been so far entirely remodeled - it supports plugins for almost all major features - thus everyone is welcome to add missing functionality without having to "rebuild" the entire application. Project state is Alpha right at the moment with the Beta period starting at July 25th.