DC> I have Warder's "Pali Metre" where he attempts to provide a chronlogy
DC> of the verse material based on changing fashions in meter, but my
DC> Pali isn't yet at the point where I can understand his arguments.
My humble opinion is that determining the metre is the easiest thing
to be computerised.
Though it is unlikely that I will manage to do such a project, at the
very least I'll pay more attention to the metre of the suttas.
DC> Excellent approach -- find the same word elsewhere! I guess your CSCD
DC> can do that? What a wonderful tool for study and research!
Yeah, it can! It finds all occasions when this word is used and puts
up a window where you can see all substrings from the texts, with
several words before and several words after the sought word.
And you can search as well the usage of certain combination of words.
(Though you have to be careful for these words not to contain
consonants with diacritical marks, and always search all texts)
You can also look up a small built-in dictionary, with a small probability
of getting necessary translation for the word.
Well, what it does truly well is redirecting to the exact commentary
to the sutta you read, both Atthakatha and Tika.
Having some knack, you can use converting selected pages to RTF
format, correcting the font afterwards.
The program almost always can print selected pages of the text.
This tool is indeed a breakthrough and a step forward, with
built-in reminder of unsatisfactory nature of all fabrications.
And the distributors were so kind to send it for free (now they charge
for shipping and postage), so being an ex-Soviet freeloader rich only
in Dhamma, I was able to obtain it.