To come back to this, I promised to upload some screenshots. There are a number of ways to go about this problem. First of all I want to point out that both the Visuddhimagga and the Suttanipata are texts with multiple files.
If you use text-view mode (or table or number view) you only get all the matches of that one file with the other collection. So I can either use one file of the Vishuddhimagga and compare that with the entire Suttanipata and then go to the next file, etc. Or I can do it the other way around: find a specific file in the Suttanipata (filenames and numbering are the same as on SC and linked to SC) and compare that with the entire Anya collection or specifically the Visuddhimagga files in that collection.
Another way for a general overview is using the Visual Charts mode (see top menu) and click on Pali. I will show this route here but you can also scroll down and see how to do things in text-view mode (or table-view mode/graph-mode).
Note however that we are revamping the site and will make changes to the database we use for these charts. Now we are using Google Charts but there are better ones available so this might also affect the functionality of it.
Then select the Anya collection as inquiry collection and ‘Suttas Early 2’ as hit collection. I like the gradient layout but you might like something else - that’s just the colors it uses.
I like to enter the full-screen mode at this point (click the little screen-icon at the left).
So you now see the Suttanipata at the right together with the other collections. And the Anya at the left. Click on the Anya collection to open it up (this unfortunately only works at the left side).
Now you get 16 pages as indicated at the top. The first two pages are all the Visuddhimagga chapters and their matches with the collections with a.o. SuttaNipata. Click on SuttaNipata on the right and it lights up those paths where there are a match.
You can again click on one of the Visuddhimagga files on the left to open it up and get a better view of that one specifically.
Clicking on the filename at the left again will open up a new tab with that one in text-view mode. Of course you can also go to text-view mode directly via the main menu (Database → Pali).
So here you see this specific chapter in the Visuddhimagga: Anya E0103n7: Anya Visuddhimagga / Chaanussatiniddesavaṇṇanā opened in text-view mode and some parts are colored, meaning there are some matches with other texts. I’ve opened it again in full-screen mode.
Now I first want to look at the filters so I open up the settings-menu at the top right:
It tells me there are 5101 matches in this file with other files that match current filters. The sliding filters are pre-set but you can also adjust those. if for instance I set the Similarity Score to 0 and Min. Match Length to 30, we all of a sudden have 7537 matches.
I can also exclude certain files or collections from the results. But here I’m more interested in showing just the Suttanipata so I will just limit my results to this collection:
You can see that now there are only 6 matches and the text at the left side has become all black. Closing the settings with the x at the top right and scrolling down I again see some color.
Clicking on this it opens up a new section on the left that shows the match with this section, which is Snp5.19, SC number 12.1-13.4. You can click on the little icon behind that to open this up in SuttaCentral.
Note that matches are calculated per character. This means that every character can have different matches. Right now there is only one match (indicated by light blue) and this happens to be the same match for the entire highlighted section, but it is possible that in other places there are multiple matches and clicking on the colored text in another part can give you different matches. Colors show how many matches a character has:
Clicking on the Snp match text, it opens up this Snp file on the right. (the middle dividers can be slided to the left or right to make more space) It shows in green any matches there may be between the two texts.
So you can do the same thing the other way around. You can open up a specific file of the SuttaNipata and see what matches with any texts there.
Another way of studying the texts is via the other view-modes. For this I have to go out of the full-screen mode by clicking the screen-icon in the top right. Then click on ‘Table’ at the top left under ‘Choose View’:
This will give you all the 6 matches between this Visuddhimagga file and the Suttanipata in table format, which might be more useful in the case at hand (note that filters have remained the same when switching view mode).
Numbers view just shows an overview of the matching numbers and links that open up the full texts that match those numbers. Numbers view also uses the same filters.
And just because it is pretty pictures, here is also the charts of the graph-view mode:
There is also a histogram chart but when I make a screenshot it does not show what happens if I hover over it so just try that out.
At the moment we cannot click on the graphs to open up texts but with the new graphics database we are using we hope this will be possible in the next upgrade.
(Note that English view no longer works as it has been moved to Linguae Dharmae, which will be launched at some point too).
Bhante @Sujato, I hope this helps a bit!
