What is a SuttaPlex card
First off, in case you don’t know, the SuttaPlex cards are what you see when you are looking at the suttas in a book. For example the first SuttaPlex card on the Dighanikaya page:
It’s chocked full of information about the sutta, including
- Pāli name,
- PTS reference,
- a link to SCVoice,
- a list of all the translations in your chosen interface language
- a list or all other translations
- parallels
- a link to the root edition
And in some cases
- a “blurb” about the sutta
- recommendation level (in the shot above that’s the tree, indicating it’s for advanced readers)
For the techie people here, all this data is available as a JSON object using the API. For example:
https://suttacentral.net/api/suttas/dn1/sujato?lang=en&siteLanguage=en
What’s new?
Verse numbers
Now those “suttas” that are made up of verses contain the specific verse numbers on the sutta’s SuttaPlex card. So for example, here is Snp2.1:
We can find these verse numbers in the Snp, Vv, Pv, Thag, and Thig. The Dhammapada has included verse numbers for some time.
Annotation badge
A growing number of suttas are getting annotations (aka footnotes). You can now tell which suttas have annotations by looking for the badge on the suttaplex card:
This annotation feature is only available for those texts created using the Bilara translation software designed by the SuttaCentral team. The “
aligned” badge indicates that you can view the Pāli along side the translation.
Ven @sabbamitta is also adding annotations to her German translations:
To actually view the annotations while reading a sutta, you need to turn that on using the “views” settings on the sutta page:
When “Tooltip on asterisk” is selected, it will look like this in the sutta:
Sidenotes will look like this on a large screen:
Thanks to Bhante @Sujato and the whole team for the constant improvements to the site!
