Chinese translation of the whole Pali Tipiṭaka is now online at CBETA

In the new CBETA you can still hash link to a line (eg. http://tripitaka.cbeta.org/T01n0001_017#0107a20 ) but i'm not sure if you can get it to turn red like you can in the old version (eg. http://www.cbeta.org/cgi-bin/goto.pl?linehead=T01n0001_p0107a20 )

I've got a little free time in the next few weeks, if it would help I wouldn't mind going through the Chinese translation of the Pali Tipiṭaka and finding the locations of the individual suttas.
eg.
DN 1 http://tripitaka.cbeta.org/N06n0004_001#0001a01
DN 2 http://tripitaka.cbeta.org/N06n0004_002#0054a01
...
AN 11.20 http://tripitaka.cbeta.org/N25n0007_012#0308a06
AN 11.21 http://tripitaka.cbeta.org/N25n0007_012#0309a13
etc. (The Chinese translation of the Aṅguttara Nikāya at CBETA is numbered according to the numbering listed in grey square brackets here http://suttacentral.net/an11.20 so my link next to AN 11.20 above actually takes you to a sutta numbered 21 on the Chinese page)

I could work through all the suttas in the nikayas and post the links up here like that, if that would help.

Hi Qianxi,

Thanks so much for this, it is really useful. I was kindly sent a copy of the latest CBETA CD a couple of weeks ago by Ven Dhammadinna, and I've had the chance to have a look at it. I extracted the XML files, but they're pretty hard to work with directly. But I didn't know that they were on the website already, which is fantastic. Congratulations to CBETA for making this happen!

Your offer of help is greatly appreciated, and I would definitely like to take you up on it. However, we don't, as a rule, link to sites any more, we prefer to host the texts ourselves. So the existing links to CBETA that we have are legacy only, and we mean to replace them with our own files as soon as we can. I've already done this with the Vinayas, and hope to do the Agamas in the next couple of months.

So if you could help us, in any capacity, with this that would be great. Rather than supplying links, though, what would be really useful is some help in preparing the files for SuttaCentral. In fact, one of the main difficulties is identifying the little discrepancies, such as you noted above in the AN numbers. If you could help us get this together, we could get these translations happening on SC without too much problem.

"what would be really useful is some help in preparing the files for SuttaCentral."

I'd be happy to try, what kind of thing is required?  I'm not too familiar with XML CSS or HTML, nor do I know how to use programming language to efficiently batch edit text files, but I can copy and paste, do find=>replace on notepad, enter data into a template and check for errors!  If you would like to send me some templates to fill or files to check, then do email anotherDELETETHISoliATgmailONEDOTcom

A couple of things I have just noticed: http://suttacentral.net/zh/da21 is showing the text of Taisho 21.  It should be showing DA 21, ie. part of the text from Taisho 1 scroll 14.  The Taisho numbers in square brackets under the DA listings http://suttacentral.net/da are wrong after DA 8 (presuming the notation is [T SutraNumber.ScrollNumber]).  DA 9 does not start on scroll 9 it starts on scroll 8 [T 1.8].

Personally I don't think that putting gaps between the Chinese characters as you have done http://suttacentral.net/zh/zh-mg-bu-vb-pj1 helps with readability.  I find the spacing used on http://tripitaka.cbeta.org/N09n0005_002 easier to read.

wow, amazing, thanks. I'll contact you via email to continue the discussion.

Regarding the spacing, thanks for the feedback. Allow me to explain the background to this choice.

One of the things I've done for SuttaCentral is to research the way that traditional typography is done for these texts. In old Chinese manuscripts, the text is often laid out in square grids. This isn't always the case, but it does seem as if the original form of the written Chinese language was as a series of characters each of which had its own square in a theoretical grid. Of course the texts were also written in descending lines, so it's not the same as modern usage.

In modern web typography the grid is usually ignored and characters are just laid out side by side. This follows the conventions of Roman text typography, but there is an important difference. In text that uses Roman characters, a series of glyphs together make up a word, which is distinguished from the words around it by spaces. The absence of spaces between letters helps the eye to see each word as a distinct entity.

In Chinese, by way of contrast, each glyph is (more or less) a word, that is, a distinct semantic entity (there are of course exceptions to this.) And this is why, it seems to me, Chinese characters most naturally prefer the breathing space that a square grid provides.

However, this is all theory. I'm not a Chinese speaker, and my reading skills are virtually non-existent. At the end of the day, the typography is in service of the reader, and if the reader's experience is not good, the typography is not working. Fortunately, the space is added with a single CSS rule, so it's trivial to change.

It would be good, though, to seek the opinions of a few different readers to guide the decision. I wonder whether the fact that you find it easier without the spacing has something to do with the horizontal flow rather than the traditional vertical flow? Or is it, perhaps, just something that changes with the times, so that everyone today is used to seeing the characters without spaces?

I should say that i'm not a native speaker of Chinese, but I do spend a lot of time reading it in books and online.  I'd be interested to hear what someone educated in a Chinese speaking country thinks.

I'm not sure that Chinese naturally goes in a grid pattern.  Here's a page from a 1239 Song dynasty printing of the Buddhist canon, here's a page of the Dīrghāgama from the 1251 Korean printing of the canon on which the Taisho canon is based.  You can see that in the vertical lines each character almost touches the preceding and following characters, whereas there is clear space between the vertical lines.

I'd say the natural layout of Chinese was formed when it was written by hand on vertical strips of bamboo.  There characters were only of an approximately fixed width(height), and there was not a fixed number of characters per vertical line.  So it's all about the vertical line, there's no hint of a horizontal+vertical grid-like alignment.

I think the reason why bunched together characters are easier to read (in the case of Buddhist texts at least) is that it makes it easier to recognise compounds and set phrases.  Just as in English you don't read familiar words letter by letter, so familiar compounds of Chinese characters (like 阿難　for Ananda, 涅槃 for nirvana, 世尊 for Bhagavan 如來 for Tathagata, and so on) can be visualised as a whole and read as a whole.  With the convenience of the Taisho punctuation, whole phrases such as ."..。佛告諸比丘。" '...The Buddha told the Bhikkhus', can be picked out by the eye and read as a whole in a similar way to reading a single English word.  This only really works if there is a clear contrast between the ordinary spacing between characters and the spacing between punctuated phrases.

All good points, I have to admit. I had been using things like this manuscript from Dunhuang as template. I can't really say, but it does seem as if the "vertical lines" layout is more common. But it is definitely a good point about the conjoined characters used for Indic terms; it was in fact these that I was thinking of when I said there were exceptions to the rule that each character is one word. Perhaps the ideal thing would be to group characters semantically; but this would be a vast job, and not really in line with how the characters are used. I'll seek feedback from some other users, and make the change if it seems useful.