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Released an Arabic–English parallel language edition of the Book of Mormon. This edition only goes through the end of Alma since that’s how much of this Arabic translation is currently published. (I’ll release an updated edition later when it’s finished.)


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Just released a Traditional Chinese–Hanyu Pinyin–Simplified Chinese parallel language edition of the Book of Mormon.


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Just posted two new parallel language editions of the Book of Mormon:

  • Simplifed Chinese–Hanyu Pinyin
  • Simplifed Chinese–Hanyu Pinyin–English
https://cdn.bencrowder.net/images/projects/parallel-edition/parallel-bofm-zhs-cmn-Latn-eng-sample.png?v2

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A few more parallel language editions of the Book of Mormon:

  • Georgian–English
  • Nepali–English
  • Simplified Chinese–English v2 (the Church updated the text recently)
  • Traditional Chinese–English
  • Traditional Chinese–Simplified Chinese

As mentioned at the end of the third batch post, I was running into an issue with Traditional Chinese where Firefox would hang when I tried to print it. Finally found out that the reason it was hanging was the font — after I switched it from Noto Serif CJK to Noto Serif Traditional Chinese, it started working.


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And some more parallel language editions of the Book of Mormon:

  • Amharic–English
  • Armenian–English
  • Simplified Chinese–English
  • Hindi–English
  • Japanese–English
  • Khmer–English
  • Latvian–English
  • Lingala–English
  • Lithuanian–English
  • Malagasy–English
  • Maori–English
  • Mongolian–English
  • Myanmar–English
  • Persian–English
  • Samoan–English
  • Slovak–English
  • Slovenian–English
  • Tahitian–English
  • Tamil–English
  • Telugu–English
  • Tongan–English
  • Turkish–English
Amharic–English side-by-side edition
Simplified Chinese–English side-by-side edition
Hindi–English side-by-side edition
Persian–English side-by-side edition
Tamil–English side-by-side edition

I think my favorite is the Persian.

Also, I made a traditional Chinese version as well, but Firefox hangs when I try to print it. It’s the only language that happened with. Haven’t been able to figure it out yet.


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More parallel language editions of the Book of Mormon:

  • Afrikaans–English
  • Albanian–English
  • Aymara–English
  • Bulgarian–English
  • Catalan–English
  • Cebuano–English
  • Croatian–English
  • Czech–English
  • Danish–English
  • Estonian–English
  • Fijian–English
  • Finnish–English
  • Greek–English
  • Haitian Creole–English
  • Hawaiian–English
  • Hmong–English
  • Hungarian–English
  • Icelandic–English
  • Igbo–English
  • Iloko–English
  • Indonesian–English
  • Korean–English
  • Malay–English
  • Norwegian–English
  • Polish–English
  • Romanian–English
  • Russian–English
  • Shona–English
  • Swahili–English
  • Swedish–English
  • Tagalog–English
  • Ukrainian–English
  • Vietnamese–English
  • Xhosa–English
  • Yoruba–English
  • Zulu–English
Korean–English side-by-side edition
Ukrainian–English side-by-side edition

I’ll have another batch posted tomorrow, too, with 22 more languages.


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Book of Mormon parallel edition

Pleased to announce a new project: parallel language editions of the Book of Mormon, available as free PDF downloads. Here’s what they look like:

Thai–English side-by-side edition
Portuguese–Spanish side-by-side edition

We’re starting out with the following editions, but I have more in the works. (Requests welcome!)

  • Dutch–English
  • French–English
  • German–Dutch
  • German–English
  • Italian–English
  • Lao–English
  • Lao–Thai
  • Portuguese–English
  • Portuguese–Spanish
  • Spanish–English
  • Spanish–Italian
  • Thai–English

Implementation/design notes

  • Chrome has a weird Skia bug where text in exported PDFs isn’t searchable/copyable, which was a dealbreaker since these editions are meant to be digital-only.
  • Firefox does handle searching and copying just fine, but (sadly) it isn’t able to break the two-columned text correctly across page breaks. This means every part of a verse has to be on the same page (as opposed to half at the bottom of one and half at the top of the next), with the result that some pages have more whitespace at the bottom than is economical.
  • Firefox also doesn’t respect break-after: avoid, so I had to add page breaks before each chapter heading (which adds even more extra whitespace) (which can be a valid design decision, to be clear, but my original intent was to stream the chapters with no breaks so that the page count wouldn’t balloon). There’s a potential workaround that I’m looking into in the meantime.
  • There are no page numbers, because Firefox and Chrome don’t yet support the CSS paged media rules for that, and Paged.js choked and died on these files.
  • Browsers still aren’t great at paragraph layout, so there are going to be occasional widows and orphans.
  • I originally started on these several years ago using LaTeX, but I ran into issues getting the page layout to work the way I wanted it to. Layout-wise, things were so, so much easier with HTML and CSS.
  • If/when some of these browser issues get fixed (or I find workarounds), I’ll post updated files.

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Scripture posters

Another experimental new project: scripture posters. Definitely leaning more on the graphic design side of things here. The other day I happened to see This Is How We Do It (a children’s book by Matt Lamothe) lying around, and seeing the cover suddenly gave me an itch to make something similar but with words from the scriptures. I’m sure others have already made designs like this, but I haven’t (till now), so here you go.

Counsel with the Lord in all thy doings (Alma 37:37)

Counsel with the Lord in all thy doings

I will go and do (1 Nephi 3:7)

I will go and do

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Come, Follow Me reader’s edition

Just released the Come, Follow Me reader’s edition. It’s an experimental supplemental edition of the Book of Mormon:

cfm-readers-edition.png

As for what it actually is: it’s a set of web pages with the text of the Book of Mormon grouped into the Come, Follow Me sections, and it’s reparagraphed sans verse numbers like my normal reader’s edition.

I have no idea whether it’s actually useful or not, but it was quick enough to make that I figured I may as well just do it. Let me know what you think.


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Weapons of War

Weapons of War
Made in Illustrator, textured in Photoshop. A reference to Alma 26:32.

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