Sanskrit texts in TEI/XML format available from SARIT

[Dominik Wujastyk]

I am pleased to announce that the SARIT project is now releasing the
TEI<http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml>-encoded
base files of five major Sanskrit works.  The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the
representation of texts in digital form.  The texts are:

   1. Brahmapurana
   2. Naradasmriti
   3. Astangahrdayasamita / Vagbhata
   4. Arthasastra / Kautalya
   5. Manusmrti

These are all relatively long works, giving a good and varied sampling of
vocabulary.  The TEI-encoded texts can be downloaded from

   - http://sarit.indology.info/downloads.shtml

where the HTML and PDF versions have been available for some time.  The
PostScript versions have been withdrawn.

These files give excellent, high-quality examples of how to go about
preparing a TEI-compliant file of a Sanskrit text.   Copyright issues have
been checked and the files can be distributed free of charge for scholarly
purposes.

If you are new to the world of the eXtensible Markup Language and
XML<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xml>files and TEI-encoding, one way
to get started is to find an XML-aware editing
program <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xml_editor>.  There are many
available, some are free: there's a comparative table
here<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_editors>.
The oXygen XML editor <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_XML_Editor> is
widely liked and is cheap ($64) for scholarly use.  It can be downloaded and
tried out free.  It is a Java application, so it can run in Windows, Mac OS
X, and Linux.

For more advanced users, please feel free to integrated these TEI files into
your own scholarly projects or databases.  If you develop further tagging or
text-enrichment, SARIT would be glad to have the enhanced TEI files to add
to the repository.

The preparation of these files was made possible by funding from the British
Academy and the British Association of South Asian
Studies<http://www.basas.org.uk/>
.

Enjoy.

Dr Dominik Wujastyk
http://SARIT.indology.info