In a small number of places, I’ve found incorrect characters used for the dividers | in the comments. I’ve replaced these, but just a reminder, the correct character is the common “vertical line”, which is right there on your keyboard. Other similar-looking characters register as an error in LaTeX.
At pli-tv-kd6:31.2.1 you quote me from Discourse. Generally I’d rather you reference my notes or translations directly, as they are updated and corrected, whereas things on Discourse may be incorrect or outdated. In this case, there are grammatical and spelling mistakes in the passage attributed to me. More accurate and up-to-date notes on the subject are at dn16:2.5.2 and dn16:2.5.5.
Here’s some more opportunities for <j> with suggested break points.
Ok, there’s a bunch of <j> candidates. I haven’t marked each one, you get the idea. Most of them are from the Parivara. I’ve put them in a zipped folder.
In addition, there are a few instances of a more difficult issue to resolve. Rarely, the “This is the summary” header for the uddanas gets oversquashed.
Basically LaTeX is trying to find room for everything and doesn’t allow enough space for these headers. Now, ultimately we should fix this by adjusting LaTeX, but that’s tricky (there are so many pushes and pulls within LaTeX, changing something from the default often creates unwelcome side effects which have to be tested for, which means regenerating all the files and reviewing them again).
In classical typography, the final resort of the desperate typographer is … reword the passage! I’ve encountered a few of these cases in the Suttas and have done that there. Effectively we can solve the problem (probably) by losing a line in the paragraphs on the same page. So if you have the opportunity to lose enough words to give an extra line of space, that’d be great. Otherwise, we’ll have to live with it for the moment.
A couple of the suggestions above relate to the Intros. If you want, I can change these thing myself, just tell me the wording.
Meanwhile, congratulations on “gynandromorph” and “sudorific”. I learned two new words today.
Sure! Ven. Nadi has already offered to do this, which means it is as good as done! To be honest, I am bit afraid of even touching the html myself, lest I blow it all up.
Thanks! Is there any way for us find these ourselves, or should we wait for you to inform us? Can we use the existing pdfs, which were published in January 2025, to spot the line over-runs? The over-runs you have shown me so far seem to match exactly what I have in the existing pdfs.
Update: I’ve assumed that the pdfs that were created in January 2025 for the purpose of printing these books are still relevant as far as line length of the verses is concerned. Based on this , I’ve added <j> wherever a single line of verse did not fit the width of the page. There were not many that were outstanding; maybe just over ten in total. The only volume I’ve not checked is the Parivāra, for which you seem to have done a thorough search. I hope I’ve not created any problems for you!
Further update: I’ve now gone through the Parivāra as well and added further <j>s. For Pvr 6, however, which is entirely in verse and where the presentation is a bit awkward, it is not quite clear how the lines should break. The verse lines are long, often stretching over three lines in the in the pdf document. Is there anything to be done here?
This might be tricky. On the one hand, I am happy to try. On the other, I am not sure how I will know that enough text has been removed. Again, I guess this will only be known when the text is compiled. In addition, these passages from the Parivāra are highly standardised, which means that changing one passage will make it stand out from the others. I am wondering if it might be better to leave it as it is.
The first one simply seemed like the best technical term. The second one was more for fun!
Bhante @Sujato, a couple of more issues I am afraid!
In “Appendix: Technical Discussion of Individual Bhikkhunī Rules” there is a problem in a number of footnotes containing Chinese characters, specifically in the discussion of Bhikkhunī Pārājika 5. There are five footnotes towards the end of the discussion where the line goes beyond the right-hand margin. I alerted Ven. Nadi, who told me this:
Chinese punctuation characters include whitespace. So, I don’t actually know what to do. Instead of messing around, I think this is a question for Bhante/Hong Da. (The internets says to either use a <wbr> tag or insert a ​ zero-width space character, or to set a css line-break property. But again even if it works in html, I don’t know what happens in LaTeX.)
Alternatively, the really ugly hacky way, if you’re super sure widths won’t change and you’re looking at the right thing, would be to just manually break up the <span> that wraps the chinese quote and insert a <br>. But this is such a wrong way of going about it.
Right, I left these alone. Probably best to ignore them.
Look at the length of the last line in the paragraphs preceding it on the page, and take out words that are longer than that.
Yes, perhaps. If it can be done easily, go ahead, otherwise leave it.
You mean the HTML file downloadable from that page? You can’t, like all the files it’s generated automatically.
Well,. of course, you can download and edit the file yourself, but I think that’s not what you meant!
Is there some problem?
ok let me look
Right, so I missed these when checking. What’s happening is that LaTeX breaks lines according to language, and it doesn’t know what to do with these characters. There’s two solutions, a good one and a hacky one. Guess which we’re going to do?
The good way: refine language in that local setting to allow Chinese line breaks.
The bad way: insert some different characters in the Chinese text that LaTeX know, eg. a comma.
The worse way: remove the Chinese text.
Ok, as far as the first option, we use Polyglossia to handle languages in LaTeX, and the documentation has the following to say:
So at least we know it’s not our problem. But it seems there won’t be an easy fix until Polyglossia updates.
Of these, we want to use a character in the line, because that will be universal. The main thing is to ensure that if we use a special character, it is actually found in our fonts, otherwise LaTeX will display a box. Let me check.
Hmm, so far as I can tell, we don’t have a zero-width space in our font.
So that narrows it down to some bad options.
add some characters to the Chinese: space, comma, or whatever. Bear in mind that it should really be every few characters, not just where the Chinese is punctuated. Obviously try to follow the meaning of the words.
Remove the Chinese. If you do so, however, you’ll need to supply specific line references.
One other small issue: at least one Chinese character is not found in our font. You can see the box that replaces it:
@HongDa can you check that our version of Noto is the latest one? Perhaps they have added new characters. Having said which, the Noto CJK fonts were basically designed to contain as many characters as they possibly can within the technical constraints. It’s unfortunately the case that there will always be some obscure old Chinese characters missing.
Yes, it needs to be edited. I suppose what I meant was to ask: where do we find the root file on the Github repository? We can then edit it and send you a pull request. Something like that. I am bit dicey on how this all works!
In the colophon of the current pdf, three minor edits are required:
“Bhikkhu Brahmali was born Normay in 1964.” > “Bhikkhu Brahmali was born in Norway in 1964.”
“as well Bhikkhu Ñāṇatusita’s” > “as well as Bhikkhu Ñāṇatusita’s”
On the copyright page there are two potential edits.
(1) The following text is centred rather than left-aligned:
You are encouraged to copy, reproduce, adapt, alter, or otherwise make use of this translation. The translator respectfully requests that any use be in accordance with the values and principles of the Buddhist community.
(2) We find the following statement:
Map of Jambudīpa is by Jonas David Mitja Lang, and is released by him under Creative Commons Zero (CC0).
Yet here is no map of India in the Vinaya translation. Either add map or delete the above statement.
If you can solve this, that’s great, but note the discussion above: this is a known limitation of Polyglossia, which we use for internationalization. Obviously there will be some solution for wrapping Chinese in LaTeX, but how complex will be I can’t say.
@HongDa this is an old typo that was fixed long ago. Somehow we have stale data being used for the publications.
style, baby
Yes there is, it’s in vol. 1, same as for the suttas.
I’ve updated a couple of other things in the copyright notice as well.
Just to let you know, I had a discussion about this w/ Hongda. We’re going to start by simply updating all our LaTeX packages to the latest version. The Polyglossia package has been updated, and it is possible this issue is already fixed. We’ll let you know tomorrow if that works.
