Christopher Jones, an assistant professor of history at BYU and editor of the Journal of Mormon History, joins Book of Mormon Art Catalog director Jenny Champoux. They discuss Harrowed Up No More by Ben Crowder. This episode complements week 31 (Alma 36–38) of the 2024 “Come, Follow Me” Book of Mormon curriculum.
I’m heavily biased here, of course, but I enjoyed watching this. It’s rewarding to see people not only discuss the symbolism I was thinking about while making the piece but also interpret it in new ways I hadn’t thought of before.
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.)
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.
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.
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:
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 weirdSkiabug 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 respectbreak-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.
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.
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.
