"The Authenticity of the early Buddhist Texts" as SC resource

Dear devs,

the idea came up to implement Bh. Brahmali’s & Bh. Sujato’s ‘The Authenticity of the early Buddhist Texts’ as a somehow integrated resource on SC, maybe with paragraphs or so.
Purpose would be to have a simple way to reference it, since again and again we discuss ebt and so many arguments and research are put into this fine work. So instead of linking a pdf and directing people to pages it would be great to have a simple way to link to specific paragraphs.

Is that somehow compatible with the idea of the site/forum?

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I’ve actually been working on something like this as a personal project, should have it functioning soon.

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That sounds cool, thanks Mat. Let me know if I can assist.

The original file is a TeX file, so it is trivial to implement the sections, paragraphs, lists, etc., even footnotes. The hard part is the bibliographical sections, which are generated via Bibtex. There’s no trivial way to implement these in HTML. Some TeX to HTML converters—I can’t remember which—will handle Bibtex, but I have not found one that also handles Unicode.

I also started something on the samita.eu website but never got very far so it is still in drafts.
We have a german translation ready soon. Ayya Kathrin has translated it and it is currently being proofread.

So I’m very happy if you do this, @SCMatt and I will simply link to it.
One idea I also had was to include the classes that were given in Perth and/or Sydney. For some reason these classes are not any more on the new Dhammaloka website but they are still on YouTube.
I also have the slides that go with the classes.

This is a general intro:

And the classes are here:

The Sydney classes are on audio only but the last one is missing:
http://www.dhammanet.org/archive/earlybuddhism

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The standard solution would be to copy the .bbl file produced by Bibtex into the .tex file (and commenting out the line referring to the .bib file) thus producing a single “stand alone” file that doesn’t require Bibtex anymore to process. It’s common to have to do that to submit manuscripts to some journals…

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Thanks for the tip, I didn’t know about this. Unfortunately, the text uses distinct bibliographies after each section, which makes it all rather complex. Here is the latest version of the files. Can you do anything with it?

a_update.zip (802.5 KB)

Yes, I had noticed that you had separate bibliographies for each chapter, and the package that is doing that (biblatex) produces a quite different .bbl auxiliary file from the standard LaTeX file.

The way forward would depend on what the desired final result is.

I’d be inclined to split it into chapters, take out the biblatex package (and possibly some other packages that might interfere with the latex to html process), and run each chapter separately, with a single bibliography for each chapter (rather than one for each section). This would break any cross-referencing between chapters, but there doesn’t appear to be a lot of that.

Or you could change to having a single bibliography at the end…

Perhaps some thought about what the desired final version is would be in order…

I’d prefer to keep the bibliographies per section, as is now. Each section was designed to be self-contained, while the chapters are more just thematic groupings.

It was ages ago that I did this, so I can’t remember the details, and unfortunately I did not keep the files. But one of the standard Latex 2 HTML utilities did in fact get the bibliographies right. The only problem was that it didn’t handle the Unicode diacriticals; I use LuaTex to compile. But that was a few years ago, and Luatex is evolving, so perhaps the situation is better now. Anyway, before changing the files around, it would be worth investigating if any conversion utilities are up to the job. Some options are discussed here.

Perhaps doing it via ConTeXt is the way to go:

The final HTML should be entirely semantic and free of styles, which may require cleaning of the generated HTML. That’s why I prefer to just convert documents by hand with regex, though that won’t work here.

There are cross references, so it would be good if the generated HTML preserved that.

Ayya, I’m glad you like the idea! Especially since I was essentially copying what was already on Samita… :worried:

I can make a section for classes, slides would be neat to also include. If you have any other ideas on what should be there please let me know. :smiley:

If I find some time I’ll see what I can figure out (if someone else doesn’t get it working first…).