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CDSL 2024 Year in Review

2024 was a year of deep structural work: a major XML conversion brought the internal format of ten dictionaries into the modern Lbody standard, Monier-Williams received extensive page-link and display improvements, and the Böhtlingk-Roth link-target programme continued with new literary sources.

hwextra → Lbody conversion across ten dictionaries​

The single largest structural change of the year was the systematic conversion of the hwextra-Lbody format across the entire CDSL corpus. In 2024 this was completed for Vācaspatyam (VCP), Śabdakalpadruma (SKD), Shabda-Sagara (SHS), Böhtlingk kürzere Fassung with verbal nouns (PWKVN), Böhtlingk-Roth (PW), L.R. Vaidya (LRV), Cappeller (CAE), Burnouf (BUR), Apte 1890 (AP90), and the Abbreviation Collector (ACC). The conversion aligns each dictionary's headword and extra-headword material with the standard pipeline, enabling more consistent cross-dictionary processing going forward.

Monier-Williams: page links, column links, and display fixes​

The MW display received sustained attention in 2024. Clickable page and column references were wired up to link directly to the scanned PDF pages of the 1899 print edition. The list display was corrected to suppress artificial homonyms and to handle special characters that had previously disrupted rendering. A large batch of user-submitted corrections was installed and the abbreviation file was revised in several passes.

Work on making the literary-source references in Böhtlingk-Roth (PWG) and the short version (PW) clickable continued throughout 2024. New link targets were added for Hariv. (Harivaṃśa), Bhāg. P. (Bhāgavata Purāṇa), and Manu entries in PWG, PW, PWKVN, SCH, and MW simultaneously. The VN (verbal nouns) section of PWG — previously incomplete — had its scan pages added and was cross-linked.

Abbreviation and authority files revised​

The csl-pywork repository received multiple rounds of revision to abbreviation and authority files: mwab_input.txt (MW abbreviations), pwgbib_input.txt (PWG bibliography), schauth/tooltip.txt (SCH authority), and burab_input.txt (BUR authority). These files drive the tooltip expansions visible when hovering over abbreviated source references in the web interface.

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