Dear friends in Dhamma,

I just wanted to let you know that we uploaded a major release of the Pali Text Reader software.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/palireader/

Please be aware that this is is the last "unstable" experimental version (alpha). The project now enters what is called a BETA phase. We hope to archieve some amount of functionality/stability during the next months. In other words, we are looking for you: anyone who can spare some moments and try the software - reporting bugs back to my address (palireader@... or this address) - i would realy appreciate any comments/ideas on how to improve the program's quality. Right now the program works only for Windows users, but a port to Unix/Linux and Mac is in the planning.

Here is some info on the current version. fyi only:

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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 feature 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)

mettâya,

Lennart Lopin

A short outlook on the first BETA version:

.) heavily improved search / font plugins and two-page reading layout.
.) final integration of postcanonical books and commentary/subcommentary "jumping to" from the mula text passages...
.)and much much more :-)

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