A very important announcement today – the Patristic Text Archive has gone online in beta! It’s here.
This is a new open-access collection of Greek (and other) texts, encoded in XML format (well, strictly it’s TEI), and freely available for download from GitHub, as I noted a couple of days ago.
But now the front-end has appeared, which means that the texts are displayed online in a format that anybody can read.
You click on the cover to get through:
Click on Open a couple more times, and you get the text, gorgeously formatted:
It’s very easy to browse, and there is so much of interest there! If I tell you that this collection includes the text of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Commentary on the Psalms for ps.1-50, you will see why I am excited.
Sometimes the texts have translations with them. There are 53 texts by Severian of Gabala (yay!) and I saw that De fide et lege naturae has a new German translation against it (double-yay!).
There are still a couple of glitches. I just clicked on the “About” link in Internet Explorer, and the page was blank below the heading (so use Chrome). More importantly on a smartphone, the UI misleads the reader: if you click on the links you won’t be able to get into any of the texts unless you know to scroll right, because the “open” button is off-screen to the right. (What they ought to do is to dispense with the “open” button and make the whole row a hyperlink). But these are mere niggles.
This is immensely welcome. Use it, everyone! This must surely be the shape of things to come.
Oh, this is very exciting! How useful and convenient!
Thank you for making us aware of this!