Astangahrdaya e-text

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Thanks to the monumental labour and generosity of Prof. R. P. Das and
Prof. R. E. Emmerick, I am now able to announce the free availability of
the machine-readable text of the Astangahrdayasamhita by Vagbhata. 

This classic text of ayurveda, composed in Sind in about AD 600, rapidly
became the defining text for the Indian medical tradition.

The files are
  vagbhata-astangahrdayasamhita.zip
  vagbhata-astangahrdayasamhita.readme

They are available via the INDOLOGY web site
  http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/indology.html
or by direct anonymous ftp from
  ftp.ucl.ac.uk:/pub/users/ucgadkw/indology/texts

There are two versions of the text in the zip file.  One is the raw text,
encoded using the CSX character encoding for transliterated Sanskrit.  The
other is tagged using the conventions of the Text Encoding Initiative
(TEI).  For more on the TEI, see http://www.uic.edu/orgs/tei/.  

I should like to encourage all creators of e-texts to think seriously of
adopting the TEI tagging scheme for the versions of their work which
become public.   This is what the TEI is for, and as a system it works
well, even if it is a bit verbose.  But a text tagged with the TEI scheme
can easily and rapidly be converted for whatever local purpose one may
have.  

May I extend my heartfelt thanks to Das and Emmerick for making this file
publicly available for scholarly use.

Enjoy!
Dominik

--
Dominik Wujastyk               Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine
email: d.wujastyk at ucl.ac.uk          183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, England
<URL: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/>                    FAX: 44 171 611 8545