Please download the ACI Hypertexting Starter Kit, which contains several useful files, including Khen Rinpoche's long-life prayer (your first project) and a completely hypertexted version of the Heart Sutra, which you can examine as a reference.
You can also refer to a preliminary version of the ACI Hypertext dictionary, though if you are working on Khen Rinpoche's long-life prayer, you should rely on the other dictionaries and only use the ACI dictionary as a last resort, since it was generated using the long life prayer. It's better to use the Jim Valby Dictionary or the Rangjung Yeshe Dictionary. However, if you are hypertexting in earnest, you should definitely use the ACI dictionary in addition to these other two.
Software
It is important that you use a simple text editor like Notepad or Wordpad (on Windows) or TextEdit, SimpleText, or BBEdit Lite (on MacOS). Please do not use a complicated word processor like Microsoft Word! Word introduces a lot of strange formatting, which makes it hard to integrate hypertext documents into the main dictionary.
To begin, just open the longlife.txt file into your text editor, and begin marking it up just like in the intermediate example.
General Advice
Tip: Look up multiple word groups before looking up a single word. The electronic dictionaries support this approach nicely.
Tip: Look up each of the words and word groups in an entire section of Tibetan before assigning them to the translation.
If you only look up a few Tibetan words at a time and try to connect them to the translation prematurely, you may get off on the wrong track. You may link a particular Tibetan word with some English, only to discover later that another Tibetan word was actually the better match. By then, your original hasty mistake may have led to other errors, so it's better to avoid this problem by looking up all the words at the start.
It can be useful to have a "scratch pad" window open on your computer, where you paste the many different dictionary lookups. This is a good way to juggle a number of definitions while you're trying to figure out where everything goes. See the screenshot below for a sample.
