Pali canon on disk?

[JHUBBARD at smith.smith.edu]

The project to put the PTS materials onto disk is quite far along. In fact, 
the input has been entirely finished (tho I haven't seen the whole thing, 
reports have it that that includes tranlsations, texts, and even journal 
articles). the project was begun some time ago, mainly initiated by Robert
Thurman, Lew Lancaster, and myself. After several rounds of denials at the
US NEH, Lew was able to interest the Dhammakay foundation in Thailand in the
project. Under the direction of Ven. Mettanando, some hundreds of monks 
virtuously typed in the whole thing (two versions, checked against each other).
The proofing is going on now. The original intent was to publish the corpus 
on CD-ROM through the Scholar's Press, the publishing house of the American
Academy of Religion. We have also agreed upon following the TEI guidlelines
for tagging, at least minimally in the initial production run and more fully
as time goes by. Alas, there are numerous "upper-level" snags that have come
up, mostly regarding the publishing, cost, PROTECTION DEVICES!!!, rights, etc.
etc. I feel strongly that the international Buddhist and academic community
will be best served by an open system, distributed at low cost. But I am only 
a small cog in a large machination. I am sorry that I cannot say more at this
point, but perhaps, if folks are interested, we could begin a grass-roots 
effort to outline interface needs (which platforms? what kind of indexing?
Sanskrit<-->Pali cross-indices? phrase marking? what kinds of problems have
you encountered on other CD-ROM text bases?), and most important, getting the
material out the door. Although I am sometimes frustrated in the "process", 
it shouldn't be too long now (maybe we can even put some TeX stuff in for
Dominik and other TeXies). 

Jamie Hubbard