So once again Firefox has made an upgrade that deactivates add-ons that do not meet their new standards, so the DPR cannot be used any more.
Anyone knows if Bhante Yuttadhammo is going to fix the issue?
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I wrote him an email to ask about it, no response yet.
In the mean time, you can download the previous version of firefox from mozilla and install that, and disable automatic updates from firefox->settings.
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Someone suggested using Waterfox instead, which I didn’t know, and that one doesn’t ram the updates down our throats, so for now it’s still working with Waterfox.
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Bhante Yuttadhammo may or may not have the time to work on this, but he has said in the past that it is open source and someone else could take on the project.
If I knew how to do it I’d just straight up make it a program you install on your pc like any other, instead of being Dependant on and attached to a browser like firefox. This program is too useful and valuable to be at the mercy of a browser.
so if anyone reads this and wants to do it, contact Bhante Yuttadhammo.
Edit : Thanks @Pasanna @silence for the tip I installed waterfox and my DPR is up and running again.
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The advantage of FF is that it works on any computer, so this was a canny decision at the time, and has worked well for, what, a decade?
I’ve never worked with browser plugins, so I’m only guessing, but since FF has adopted an entirely new plugin architecture, I suspect that it may be quite a bit of work to adapt a complex app like DPR.
These days the cool kids are using Electron to make cross-OS apps. But to be honest the practical approach is probably to simply keep it going in an old FF version.
Meanwhile, are there any killer features on DPR that people miss on SC? We’ll never do all the things DPR does, but what is there that’s really useful? Number 1 is, of course, offline use: but we have that covered in the next version. Anything else?
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Choice in compound parsing, overall usability, declensions would be right at the top afaiac
Having a separate window that contains pali word definition is very useful. The cursor hovering over a word to pull up a bubble window with the word definition obstructs your vision, so when you’re trying to understand several words in a phrase for example, or need to see the context of a paragraph or section, it impairs your ability to see and compare. Having a separate dictionary window prevents that.
Also sometimes a word definition has many definitions, and you want that text to be persistent so you can chew on it as your examining defintions of other words around it. The separate definition window givees you the ability to keep the word you want persistent.
Ideally you have both the bubble hovering definition (which you can turn on and off as needed) and the dictionary separate window, then you get the best of both worlds.
Not going to happen any time soon I’m afraid, but as a long term goal we do want to improve the lookup tool. We can review this (and the questions below) when that happens.
Ditto, but we can look at what DPR does and see how it does it.
Hmm, let me consider it.
The alternative would be to render this feature useless by adding the parsing onto the text itself, which would solve the problem once and for all. It would take knowledgeable manpower but it’s doable, all the more that each parsing fix can be automatically extended to the entire canon
These things are really hard, and the problem is so few people understand the Pali well.
I started doing it on my website about 5 years ago, but then stopped when I discovered that SC was going to have a lot more manpower and programming skills.
Here is an example: http://www.buddha-vacana.org/sutta/majjhima/mn152.html
It was a very unprofessional work, but I could still get things done.
It seems to me that all it would take would be to insert invisible tags inside the compounds to tell the algorithm that displays the bubbles how to parse the words. Even if the result is not perfect and there will be some errors, it will still be a lot better than the current state of the tool on SC, and errors can be rectified whenever identified. It seems to me that SC has nothing to lose here.
I would gladly volunteer for such a project.
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Well, that sounds excellent. Let’s start another thread and discuss it properly.
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I’ve used your site! It’s cool! Thank you 
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OK so update on Pali Reader for Mac, maybe also fine for non-Mac (is it worth making this into a new post?)
-Download Waterfox from here:
The DPR plugins don’t show up when you are in waterfox searching for it. So go here and download it directly, while using Waterfox. It should prompt to install it directly:
Then go to the the tools menu at the top of the page and select addons. From that page, under extensions, you can find the Pali Reader. On the DPR plugin you can click preferences, and from there, under sets, you can download the Myanmar Tipitaka.
Also somehow you need to install the Digital Pali Reader Myanmar Tipitaka Plugin. I don’t know if that is the thing I just said last, or if that is another thing, because I did get a prompt at some stage for that and had to click something… all a bit confusing…
At some stage it prompts to restart, and then you go to the top again to tools, and there will be an option at the bottom, Digital Pali Reader. Clicking that should open up the Pali Reader and you can get started.
And for reference, the homepage for the DPR is here:
https://pali.sirimangalo.org/
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DPR works fine on the Pale Moon browser but has there been any interest to upgrade it to newer browsers or perhaps make it a standalone program? It could use a touch up on UI as well.
My understanding is that Ven Yuttadhammo has moved on and is not developing it further. Perhaps someone else could take it over and develop it as a standalone app, but it doesn’t look like happening any time soon.
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Is there any other way to search the canon for words and phrases on a Mac? I still use it for the DPR for that but then have to use Suttacentral to find the text to see the context. And that can be hard due to numbering differences. But it’s still the best way I know to search. There was one other way I knew using Goenka’s group’s … something or other… but DPR seemed better
There’s always another way.
- For full control over searching, you can download our data and search it with whatever you want.
- If you’re feeling lucky, use Google site search, eg.
site:suttacentral.net metta sutta. (If you do the same in DuckDuckGo, you get “Galadriel” as the number one translator!) - For searching English, download the EPUBs. If you want you can stitch them into one file and search it all.
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Awesome!
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