Dear List,

Apologies for sending essentially the same message twice yesterday: I wanted to send notice about the availability of these files to several lists and inadvertently sent it twice to Indology.

To fill in some more of the background, in the mid 80s the PTS signed an agreement with the Dhammakaya Foundation in Thailand, who basically provided the necessary resources to input the text of the PTS edition of the canon. TEI-XML had yet to evolve and the plan was to produce a CD-ROM package. I think two versions were released in the 1990s and distributed to a number of people. The general verdict was that neither version worked particularly well. Some years went by. Eventually the Council of the PTS came to the conclusion that it was unfortunate that these digital files existed but very few had access to them. The simplest and most efficient way of making them widely available seemed to be to add them to the GRETIL resource. The Dhammakaya files were usable but certainly needed some tidying up. The PTS is extremely grateful to Reinhold Gruenendahl for all the work he has put in in order to make these files more user friendly and accessible. TEI-XML mark up would be a good next stage.

With best wishes,

Rupert Gethin

On 13/10/2014 17:37, Birgit Kellner wrote:

These files are tremendously valuable, and the PTS, Rupert Gethin, the Dhammakaya Foundation and Reinhold Gruenendahl deserve our heartfelt thanks. This is truly a great initiative.

Are there any plans to make them available in TEI-XML? That would increase their utility tremendously.

Or, to ask the question differently: Is there any particular reason why TEI-XML was not chosen from the start?

It has its disadvantages, like every markup language and encoding schema, but it is so widely used now, and much more flexible than HTML.

Thanks again,

best regards,

Birgit Kelner

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Rupert Gethin
University of Bristol
Department of Religion and Theology
3 Woodland Road
Bristol BS8 1TB, UK

Email: Rupert.Gethin@bristol.ac.uk