Just a few clarifications. Development of the ‘Research Environment for Ancient Documents’ software is primarily funded by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, through the Buddhist Manuscripts from Gandhāra project
http://www.gandhara.indologie.lmu.de
The programming is done by our colleague Stephen White in Venice. The initial feature design of READ was my own as part of planning this long‐term research project, and I would also like to mention my Munich colleague Andrea Schlosser who made many important contributions to UI design and debugging. We make the source code of the software available on the following GitHub page:
https://github.com/readsoftware/read
which also contains further description of the project and some screenshots of it being used by us in the Bavarian Academy project to edit Gāndhārī manuscripts. We now also use READ to present editorial work in progress on our ‘workshop’ page, under the above URL.
Since we make the software available under an open‐source license, it is also being used and modified by a number of other researchers in their own separate projects (including at the University of Sydney and several other institutions).
Andrew Glass and I do plan to use the READ software to improve the presentation of our complete corpus of Gāndhārī texts on my website Gandhari org, as described in my blog post that you link to. Overall, however, I intend to keep the look of Gandhari org very close to what it is now and what people have become accustomed to.
Last not least, since I came up with the name of this software back in 2013, a brief defense of it: The full name is of course ‘Research Environment for Ancient Documents,’ which is fairly unique and googlable. The acronym READ, on the other hand, I never intended to be unique (and in fact it is not), only to provide a handy abbreviation in running text.
Thank you for your interest in our software. Please do check it out in action at the website of the Bavarian Academy project, and of course feel free to download a copy of the source code from our GitHub repository (though you may want to wait until we have written proper documentation and installation instructions).