In 2011 I spent the best part of six months preparing a website for image files of the whole Tipiṭaka in Sinhala script from the edition known as the Buddha Jayantī Tripiṭaka Granthamālā, the main edition of the texts published in Sri Lanka.
There is a transcript in Roman script available in many forms and many places released under the Sri Lankan Tipitaka Project, but it is full of mistakes (I estimated at one time that Majjhimanikāya alone might have upwards of 10,000 mistakes in the transcription, roughly 10 a page).
So the publishing of the image files is the only reliable edition of the material available outside of hardcopy, and is therefore a valuable resource for scholars on the one hand, and for students who cannot carry all 56 books with them on the other.
It was always intended to add in images of the commentaries as well, but the people preparing the scans were busy with other projects for a long time, until now, when we have the first images from the commentaries published, being the Majjhima-aṭṭhakathā.
I have also prepared image files for the Abhidhānappadīpikā, the only Pāḷi dictionary or thesaurus in the edition by Waskaduwe Subhūti Thera, one of the great Sinhalese scholars of the 19th century.
This is a large and ongoing project, and I am glad we are back on course again with this work, and hopefully we can soon have the commentaries on the main nikāyas published, and other auxiliary works as well.
I should make it clear that the files are all written in Pāḷi and in Sinhala script, so only people who know that language and script will be able to benefit, but I always thought I have a great debt of gratitude to the Sri Lankan Sangha, where I took ordination and first studied Pāḷi, and this is one way to give some help back.
A wonderful reading article deep into Buddhist literature that exposes knowledge to a layman and Buddhist devotees