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.
This version now uses the licensed text of the scriptures from the Church, which means I’m finally able to make editions in other languages. To start out, we’ve got French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and of course Spanish.
To make it easier to create versions of the study edition in other languages, I started over from scratch, using a set of Python scripts to pull the text from the files the Church sent me, then generate a LaTeX document that gets turned into the PDF. It’s a really nice workflow.
Over the next month or so I’ll be revising several of my other scriptures projects (reader’s edition, Words of the Prophets, etc.) to use the licensed text, with a similar Python-based workflow to make updates easier.
Also, if you’re interested in a study edition in a new language, let me know.
The collection contains eight stories including “La Belle au bois dormant” (Sleeping Beauty), “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” (Little Red Riding Hood), and “La Barbe-Bleuë” (Bluebeard).
This book marks the beginning of a series of fairy tale and folk tale collections that I’ll be publishing. (The original 1812/1815 German edition of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen is next and is almost done.) Future books in this series will include the Arabian Nights (including Galland’s original French translation), the eight-volume Russian collection by Alexander Afanasyev, Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, and Joseph Jacobs’ English fairy tales, among others. (And while there will certainly be an emphasis on the earliest editions of these tales, I’ll also be publishing English translations.)
If you know of any pre-1923 fairy/folk tale collections you’d like to see in this series, let me know.
