The Pali Text Reader software is a reader for Pali texts. It provides in depth search (both throughout the tipitaka or single files), a dictionary and an (machine based) automatic Pali - English translator. The Pali Text Reader comes along with a library, containg all Tipitaka books compressed in a zip archive. Thus, you can read, search and study the Buddhist Canon wherever you are .
Pali is an ancient middle Indian language, either being Buddha's own mother tongue or at least a language closely related to the Blessed Ones own language. For over 2500 years Buddhist tradition handed down a vast amount of scriptures all written in Pali, which contains the accumulated wisdom of the Buddhist teaching.
During the 90's, in a joint effort, the Pali Canon literature (containing several thousand pages) was digitized and published by the VRI, a none profit organisation. Their CDROM, the "Chattha Sangayana CDROM" or CSCD has been since one of the foremost tools when studying the source of Buddhist teaching. However, the software which handled reading and studying the volumes quite well, is not open source.
Quite contrary, the Pali Text Reader is based on a plugin framework inviting users to improve and customize the reader to their needs. Besides, being written in C# its developers hope to port it soon to Linux/Unix and Macintosh..
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