A woodcarving at Dege Monastery

Outlines (sa bcad)

The outline section of the Literature Collections is a repository for digital outlines of Tibetan texts. Tibetan works, especially in the genre of the religious literature, often present their topics through a deep and highly structured outline (sa bcad). One genre of texts, condensations (bsdus don), are devoted to outlining scriptures and important commentarial works. The THDL has developed a method for marking up such outlines in XML for the purpose of digital dissemination. These digital outlines are available through this portal as is the documentation describing how they are made. In the left-hand highlight box are the outlines that are presently available. On the right-hand, there are links to the resources provided for creating digital outlines of Tibetan texts, include a Visual Basic for Word macro that will automatically convert a properly styled Word document into an XML outline.