First let me express my big admiration and thanks to @stu and his wonderful team at W&W for making the course available in the first place, and for his kindness and enthusiastic support in making this version, to Ayya @vimala for editing the original course audio where it needed editing and of course to Ajahn @Brahmali, for making it all possible in the first place.
The offline course design is based on the insights described in the book
and on a CSS based web design by Dave Liepmann based on Edward Tufte’s book designs (which are well known in the LaTeX community).
https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/
Tufte CSS
Dave Liepmann
Tufte CSS provides tools to style web articles using the ideas demonstrated by Edward Tufte’s books and handouts. Tufte’s style is known for its simplicity, extensive use of sidenotes, tight integration of graphics with text, and carefully chosen typography.
The core transcript files are based on the Introduction to Pali online course at Wisdom & Wonders (see this thread: Introduction to Pali at Wisdom & Wonders - #24 by stu) and on the audio recordings of the course given by Ajahn Brahmali.
Additional resources and fonts are available under CC-BY-SA or similar licenses by their authors, all additional code and styles developed specifically for this offline course (audio player and modified UI) are available under CC0 and can be reused in any way without restrictions or attribution.
All comments, criticism and suggestions are welcome!
Basic Tutorial
The motivation that led to this simplified (in style) offline version of the course was actually the same thing that impressed me the most when I first saw the online course—the audio player and the ability to jump to a specified section of the course and follow along. And while this approach seemed flawless on the (relatively) large screen of a 10” tablet it quickly turned to frustration when I wanted to follow the course on a smaller device, i.e. a mobile phone.
And from this came an idea for a streamlined offline version suitable for all those who only have access to small, touch-based devices with limited internet connectivity. The footprint for the entire course is as small as possible, with the ability to download only the core functionality and then download the separate audio files as needed.
Installation instructions
- Download ITP_Offline.zip to local folder. Extract to desired location (all files will be extracted to “location\ITP_Offline” subfolder).
- Optionally download Pdf.zip to local folder (not recommended on small devices). Extract to “ITP_Offline\Pdf” subfolder.
- Then download each optimized mp3 file to “ITP_Offline\Audio” subfolder.
- Open “ITP_Offline\Introduction_to_Pali.htm” to start the course.
The interface
There are two modes for the UI:
- the full view, available to devices with sufficient screen width, with notes and audio player elements positioned on the right margin, where they don’t interfere with the flow of the main body of text
and
- the collapsed view, where those same elements are hidden by default and can be displayed on demand by the user when needed.
Touch the side note number to display the note text
Touch the play/pause indicator at the start of the paragraph to display audio player
Touch the question to reveal/hide answer or touch ‘Show/Hide All’ to reveal/hide all answers
Touch play button to start audio (the player collapses on play, the current paragraph auto scrolls to the top)
Touch additional player buttons to skip back 5sec, forward 15sec or start from the beginning.
Scroll table horizontally or tilt the device into a landscape position.
Use navigation buttons to go to next/desired lesson