Your comments
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.
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.
We are well behind schedule in getting the Agama texts actually on Suttacentral, this is very high on my priorities right now.
As for fonts, we don't deliver any Chinese fonts, so what you're seeing is one of the fonts on your computer. We try to deliver the best fonts possible to support different languages, but the Chinese character set is just too big!
As for fonts, we don't deliver any Chinese fonts, so what you're seeing is one of the fonts on your computer. We try to deliver the best fonts possible to support different languages, but the Chinese character set is just too big!
and now it's fixed.
No, that's not deliberate at all. Thanks for letting us know, we'll fix it ASAP.
And Ven Nandiya just fixed it! Let us know if you find any other problems.
Hi, thanks, we just upgraded and it must be a bug, bear with us it'll be fixed soon!
Customer support service by UserEcho
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?