CST Reader is a cross-platform application for reading and searching Pali texts. The current main branch contains CST 5.0 built on modern .NET 10 and Avalonia UI, representing a complete ground-up rewrite from the legacy Windows-only CST4 versions.

This repository contains multiple branches representing different stages of CST development:

• main (current): CST 5.0 - Modern cross-platform reader built on .NET 10 and Avalonia UI with advanced search capabilities
• cst_4_2: CST 4.2 development branch featuring Lucene.NET 4.8 upgrade work (never released, but provided foundation for current search system)
• cst_4_1: CST 4.1 - The currently released Windows version (tagged as v4.1.0.3-2022-04-05) built on .NET Framework with WinForms
• cst_4_0: CST 4.0 - Previous stable Windows release (tagged as v4.0.0.15-2020-05-07) also using .NET Framework and WinForms
• cst_avalonia: Previous name for the current main branch (now obsolete)

The legacy CST4 branches (4.0, 4.1, 4.2) were Windows-only applications requiring Visual Studio 2022, WiX Toolset v3 for installer creation, and the separate tipitaka-xml repository for text data. These versions used WinForms and .NET Framework with basic Lucene search capabilities.

CST Reader 5.0 is a modern, cross-platform Pali text reader featuring:

• Cross-Platform: Built on .NET 10 and Avalonia UI, supporting macOS (tested) with Windows and Linux compatibility
• IDE-Style Interface: Dock-based layout with resizable panels, tab management, and persistent session state
• Complete Session Restoration: Saves and restores open books, search highlights, window positions, and scroll positions across sessions
• Floating Windows: Book and PDF tabs can be floated into separate windows (button-based, to stay crash-safe with CEF on macOS)
• Dark Mode: Full dark-mode support across all panels and book content, including color-inverted search highlights
• Native Packaging: Production-ready macOS .dmg packages with proper application branding

• Multi-Script Support: All 14 Pali scripts supported for both display and search input (Devanagari, Latin, Bengali, Cyrillic, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Khmer, Malayalam, Myanmar, Sinhala, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan)
• Per-Tab Script Selection: Each book tab remembers its script setting independently
• Font Management: Complete per-script UI font system with native font detection and real-time updates
• Script Conversion Quality: Lossless round-trip conversion for 13 of the 14 scripts, verified by a comprehensive validation framework; the few Cyrillic exceptions are an inherent limitation of that transliteration scheme (it cannot distinguish certain vowel sequences), not a converter defect

• Full-Text Search: Lucene.NET 4.8+ implementation with position-based indexing for all 217 texts
• Query Types: Exact, phrase (quoted), proximity (all-within-a-window), and mixed/multiple-phrase queries; wildcard (*/?) and regular-expression search — all working across the 14 scripts
• Two-Color Highlighting: Distinct colors for the match anchor vs. remaining matched words, with occurrence-by-occurrence Next/Prev navigation
• Smart Filtering: Checkbox-based book filters with live counts and category management
• Incremental Indexing: Only processes changed files, not the entire text corpus
• XML Updates: Automatic GitHub integration for file updates with SHA-based change detection

• Burmese Edition PDFs: View the Burmese 1957 and 2010 edition source PDFs in dockable tabs (rendered via CEF's PDFium), downloaded on demand from SharePoint and cached locally
• Context-Aware Navigation: Opens the PDF to the page matching the current page in the rendered book

• Modern Stack: .NET 10, Avalonia UI 11.x, ReactiveUI, Dependency Injection
• WebView Rendering: Uses WebViewControl-Avalonia for book content with search highlighting
• Comprehensive Testing: 200+ tests covering unit, integration, and performance scenarios
• Advanced Logging: Structured Serilog logging across all components

Note: All development and testing has been performed on macOS. Cross-platform compatibility is designed-in but not yet tested on Windows/Linux.

• .NET 10 SDK
• macOS development environment
• Git access to this repository

# Navigate to project directory
cd src/CST.Avalonia

# Build project
dotnet build

# Run application
dotnet run

# Run all tests
dotnet test

Create production packages using the included script:

# Apple Silicon package (default)
./package-macos.sh

# Intel Mac package
./package-macos.sh x64

# Apple Silicon package (explicit)
./package-macos.sh arm64

The packaging script creates:

• Self-contained .NET 10 app bundles with all dependencies
• Proper macOS application structure with Info.plist and icons
• DMG installer files (requires brew install create-dmg)
• Support for both Apple Silicon and Intel architectures

src/CST.Avalonia/          # Main application source
├── ViewModels/             # ReactiveUI ViewModels
├── Views/                  # Avalonia XAML views
├── Services/               # Core business logic services
├── Resources/              # App resources, XSL stylesheets
└── Tests/                  # Comprehensive test suite

src/CST.Lucene/            # Search engine library
docs/                       # Architecture, features, research, release process

The application requires Pali text data from the separate tipitaka-xml repository. CST 5.0 includes automatic XML update functionality that downloads text files directly from GitHub as needed.

For working with the legacy Windows versions:

• CST 4.1 (current release): Switch to cst_4_1 branch, requires Visual Studio 2022, WiX Toolset v3
• CST 4.2 (unreleased): Switch to cst_4_2 branch for Lucene 4.8 development work
• CST 4.0 (previous release): Switch to cst_4_0 branch for older stable version

See individual branch READMEs for specific legacy build instructions.

• Documentation index: docs/README.md — architecture, implementation notes, feature specs, research, and the release process.
• Roadmap / planned work: tracked as GitHub issues (filter by the feature / enhancement labels); detailed specs for several features live in docs/features/planned/.

The texts are provided by the Vipassana Research Institute (VRI). See individual text files for specific attribution and licensing information.