Digital Pali Reader
Phra Yuttadhammo and Alexander Genaud have developed a very useful tool for translators and dhamma researchers.
The Digital Pali Reader (DPR) is a tool in the form of a Mozilla Firefox extension, much like a hard-copy language reader, facilitating study of the Pali language at an advanced level.
Rather than offering a translation for the text being read, a reader usually includes a dictionary with all of the difficult words found in the reader.
The DPR differs from an ordinary reader in several respects:
1. The DPR allows for instant lookup of words, simply by clicking on a word in the passage being read. This avoids time spent looking for the word in a hard-copy dictionary or in another place on one's computer.
2. The DPR has a built in search function similar to that of the CSCD. Whereas the CSCD allows for only global searches or searches of entire pitakas, the DPR provides Nikaya and Book searches as well.
3. The dictionary files in the DPR were not designed specifically for the purpose at hand, and of course word-to-definition matches are sometimes incorrect due to imperfect analysis.
4. The DPR includes several dictionaries: Pali-English, English-Pali, Pali proper names, and Concise Pali Dictionary. These dictionaries can be directly accessed from the control panel.
5. The DPR has several useful auxiliary utilities, including:
ēbookmark and quote clipboard for keeping important passages
ēA Pali conversion utility that converts to and from Velthius, Unicode, and other scripts
ēRandom English quotes from Buddhavacana, by S. Dhammika
While the DPR is far from perfect, it is sure to be useful for intermediate Pali students who wish to advance their studies to a higher level.
To get started, install both the DPR extension and Myanmar Tipitaka extensions from the sidebar, and optionally the Thai Tipitaka and Sanskrit dictionary extensions.
At this time it is restricted to users of Mozilla Firefox browser. In Firefox, click the links below and OK the install.
Phra Yuttadhammo's Digital Pali Reader may be downloaded from SourceForge.
