Dear all, Dear M. Spier,

A few notes about your second point.

As evidenced by the menu on the top right, sanskritdictionary.com uses Google's OCR engine, namely Tesseract (https://tesseract-ocr.github.io). The software can be downloaded freely and is relatively straightforward to use through tools like ocrmypdf (https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io). As far as I know, no models are yet available for recognizing transliterated Sanskrit, but there is one for Sanskrit written in devanāgarī.

Now, concerning the contents-based search feature, there is a caveat to keep in mind: a large proportion of the PDF files originating from DLI (both those available at http://dli.sanskritdictionary.com and those available at https://archive.org/details/digitallibraryindia?tab=collection) were originally passed to OCR with incorrect language or script parameters, when they were passed to OCR at all. The extracted text is thus of low quality, which leads to poor search results.

I have found it absolutely worth it to systematically download the books from DLI I might be interested in, to pass them to OCR with the correct language parameters (determined with a classification model), and to use a local full-text search tool. By contrast, books from other major collections on archive.org (e.g. those from the library of Toronto) are generally well indexed and can be searched directly through archive.org's interface.

Best,

Michaël Meyer