I spent a few days hacking and decompiling the Visuddhimagga PDF edition from 2011, frustrated by the fact how difficult it is to navigate.

The result is quite good and complete semantic data (XML) from which the entire Visudhimagga can be produced in various formats (as a preview, there is PDF, HTML (plasTeX), HTML (Sphinx) and ePub).

If you would like to give hand in pushing this further, or are just interested, please read more on this page. To summarize, I would like to 1. first verify the data are a sound basis, 2. polish them manually, 3. enhance them (automatically: more hyperlinks, liks to sutta locations online etc), 4. produce high-quality electronic editions — and more

This looks like a great initiative! I would love to have more of these texts readable as actual ebooks.

As someone who has worked in and out of publishing for quite a while, I would encourage you to get in touch with the BPS sooner rather than later. They are obviously amenable to having this text disseminated, but they are still a publisher with copyright over the text, and publishers usually like to know what's going on with their texts. The PDF mentions "Bhikkhu Nyanatusita, the BPS editor". Maybe try making contact with him? Or just throw an email at bps@bps.lk. If you like, I'd be willing to help do that.

Also, have you checked out pandoc for converting between various formats? It will also do epub.

Thanks for all this work!

Hi Eric, thanks for your encouragement

Good idea with BPS, I dropped them an e-mail.

I worked with both Pandoc (for simple things) and Sphinx (Saints & Psychopaths, Contemplative Fitness, Mahasi Teacher's Manual) in the past, but they are too inflexible in this case — it is little things, such as chapter numbers in roman numerals, support for footnotes (incl. referencing a footnote from different chapter); LaTeX is just so good at this. I will try Pandoc as downstream processor (ReST is already generated for Sphinx, and Pandoc can read ReST, IIRC).

I am surprised by the PlasTeX HTML output btw, I can read Visudhimagga on the phone now

Interesting! I've never use Pandoc for epubs, I didn't know it was that limited. I've never found a good epub producer, TBH, and the ones I've made have always been done more or less by hand, which is an enormous pain in the ass. I have found Sigil to be good for editing them after the fact, but by that point the grueling work has mostly been done.

I'd be willing to help with verification. But I hope one of the benefits of speaking to the BPS directly is that they would be willing to share their digitized text with you!

I guess the Visuddhimagga is in somewhat usable state now (on the same address) - the text should be good, sectioning is there (same as the PTS/BPS2011 edition, plus some documented additions). There are formatting errors in the index and glossary, I will go through these slowly as I don't consider those parts as relevant as the others. If you spot some errors (other than index and glossary), please report them by clicking on the revision number or paragraph number (they will take you to github issue with location). I find the current, more visible sectioning superior for orientation. Still no reply from BPS, oh well. @Eric, thanks for encouragements. May this help people's practice _/\_

This is great, thank you. I wish the MCBT2 was as easy to navigate, with the clickable chapters and everything.

Vimuttimagga is there same page, at the very bottom. Probably contains lots of typos in the Pali text, but the main text is good to go; so consider it a reader's edition, not for scholarship. (Nyanatusita published a new translation of VImuttimagga last year, but it is only available as physical book.)
The current website book looks like an automatic conversion and is a bit clumsy, but those are perhaps compromises with the hosting service etc which I can understand. I prefer the printed copy for this and other reasons

As a challenge, I used the same machinery for MCTB2 web-scraped from mctb.org . See https://eudoxos.github.io/mctb2/ . Take it as a demo, it has some known defects.

Oh, very nice. Skimming through it quickly it seems to work fine. I'll try to use it whenever I get back to reading it. Good work.

Your idea is great, really. I've always wanted to be able to read a lot of text in actual e-book form. Good luck. I support you.

survivor io

Thanks !