Alrighty, I’ve finished the brand new Kindle versions and updated EPUB versions of the Doctrine & Covenants reader’s edition, Pearl of Great Price reader’s edition, and Words of the Prophets (a compilation of twenty-two sermons from the Book of Mormon). Enjoy.
My new reader’s edition of the Doctrine and Covenants is now up and ready for download (PDF and EPUB).
Basically, I’ve taken the text of the D&C, stripped out all the verse numbers, reparagraphed the text, reorganized the sections chronologically (I only had to move a handful of sections), gave each section a name (based loosely on Dane Laverty’s post, but I think I only kept around 10% of his titles), and pulled the date and place of each revelation up to make them more visible.
This also marks the release of my first EPUB. I’d thought about exporting straight from InDesign, but I’m a do-it-myself kind of a guy (at least at first), so I handcrafted this one. The process: I exported the text from InDesign to a plain text file (before I did copyfitting), then used Vim and some regular expressions to put a marker in between each section. I couldn’t figure out how to split the sections into individual files from Vim, so I wrote an awk script that did it for me, then wrote a Python script to take each text file and put it into an HTML file formatted the way I wanted it. And there were a few other scripts I wrote to generate various parts of the EPUB. All in all, not too bad, though I wish EPUB readers like Stanza would give me at least a little more control over formatting. (None of my CSS worked. Sigh.)
I should add that I’ve tested the EPUB in Stanza on my iPhone and in iBooks on my iPad and it works fine in both places. Let me know if it doesn’t work on your reader (or if it looks weird).
I’ve been working on a reader’s edition of the Doctrine & Covenants for the past month and figured I’d give y’all a sneak peek at how it’s coming:
I’m currently about a fourth of the way through reparagraphing the text and hope to have everything done by the end of the year.
The book will be available as a free PDF, and you’ll also be able to order a hardcover or paperback edition through Lulu.