PKTC - Electronic Reference Centre

How to Build Your Own
Electronic Reference Centre

This page shows how to use the various resources we provide to make an electronic reference centre on your own computer. The thing that makes it possible is our software that was designed specifically for the purpose of Tibetan studies. What makes it easy is the various, high quality reference works we have published and which are available through this and other sites either by purchase or free download.

The Software That Provides the Power:
You can use either our Tibetan word-processor called TibetDoc or the TibetD Reader software that comes with all of our reference works as the basis for your reference library. The software is professionally programmed and includes many features for working with Tibetan language. At the simplest level, if you have either program installed on your computer, you can do lookups of the meaning of a Tibetan word just by clicking on the word, right-clicking, and choosing a dictionary for the lookup. (You must have purchased and installed one or more of our dictionaries to do this). However, there is another feature in both programs that allows you to set up, and access, a complete library of works on your computer. This feature is called "Find in files". It lets you search for a phrase in files on disk. The search is very fast and returns a list of all files in which your phrase has been found. You can read more about the software on our Tibetan Computer Company site.

Adding Reference Works to Your Library:
We help you to build a reference library in several ways. To run the library you must have our software which has the reference library feature built in to it. If you have already purchased TibetDoc or any of our commercial products that use TibetD Reader (all of our dictionaries and texts come with TibetD Reader), then you already have the software needed to start your library. Otherwise, you start by purchasing one or more of our dictionaries, reference works, or Tibetan texts or our TibetDoc wordprocessing software.

Next, you add electronic titles to your library. If you purchased any of our dictionaries, reference works, or Tibetan texts, these are already part of your library. You can add to it further by downloading any of the texts and reference works available on our free texts page. Alternatively, you can use our TibetDoc wordprocessing program to input, correct, and even publish your own texts in the electronic format needed. These can be added to your own reference library and you could even publish them and make them available for others to use in the same way. Furthermore, you can use TibetDoc to import texts from other sources, such as texts in Wylie format, Sambhota format, and Tibetan Unicode format which are available from several sources. These can also be used within your library.

Arranging the Texts in your Library:
When you have some reference works in your library, you arrange them on your hard disk in locations that will make the searching useful to you. This is done using the search location feature within the Find in Files feature of our software that drives the library. Full information about how to set this up is in the help that comes with the programs and a large help button is conveniently placed on the Find in Files dialogue box to make it as easy as possible to understand.

One Searches Covers All:
All of the files you have accumulated can be included in a search. Thus you can search just one time through a variety of reference works to find something you are interested in. It is also possible to selectively remove and add specific locations to the search so that you can target your search in specific types of literature.

Doing a search:
Next, you type or copy the text you want to search for into the appropriate box, then press the search button. The search process is extremely fast; we can search over 100, standard Tibetan volumes in about 20 seconds on a 3GHz computer.

As the search proceeds, a list is made of the files containing your phrase and the number of times the phrase is found in each is also shown.

When the search is over (or you can cancel it at any time without losing the list of items already found) you can click on any file in the list and it will open into the software.

To make things even easier, you can elect to have a file open right at the first occurence of the phrase you were looking for. Once the file is opened, you can either read the content around your phrase or you can use the full range of features in our software to look further through the file. For example, to find further occurences in the file you can simply press F3 and be take to the next instance of the phrase immediately.

Versatility:
You can search for any phrase using this feature! You can search for non-Tibetan, Tibetan, and Sanskrit-containing diacriticals. You can even search for formatting features such as bold, and so on. In short, you can search for anything, in any combination, that could be found in our software.

One of the remarkable features of the search system is that the software takes on the face of the file that is loaded; the interface changes on the fly to the full set of features belonging to that file type. For example, if you are in our wordprocessor, TibetDoc, and open a dictionary file, the TibetDoc interface goes away and the full-featured dictionary interface appears. If you click on another file and it is a word-processing file, then the word-processing interface returns.

At the end of your session, you can return to the file you were working on originally simply by pressing a button provided for the purpose. The Find in File interface disappears and the file you were working on re-opens at the place where you left off working. You can read more about our suite of software and these features at our Tibetan Computer Company site.

Windows and Macintosh:
We spend more time on developing our Windows products simply because most people doing Tibetan studies use Windows for their work. At the moment, this feature is only available in the Windows version of TibetD Reader and there is no Macintosh version of TibetDoc.

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