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    <title>#lao posts — Ben Crowder</title>
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      <title>Book of Mormon parallel edition</title>
      <link>https://bencrowder.net/blog/2023/book-of-mormon-parallel-edition/</link>
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      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Mar 2023 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Crowder]]></dc:creator>
      <description><![CDATA[<p>Pleased to announce a new project: <a href="https://bencrowder.net/book-of-mormon-parallel-edition/">parallel language editions</a> of the Book of Mormon, available as free PDF downloads. Here’s what they look like:</p>
<p><figure class="border">
        <a href="https://bencrowder.net/book-of-mormon-parallel-edition/"><img src="https://cdn.bencrowder.net/images/projects/parallel-edition/parallel-bofm-tha-eng-sample.png?v1" alt="Thai–English side-by-side edition" title="Thai–English side-by-side edition" /></a>
        
      </figure></p>
<p><figure class="border">
        <a href="https://bencrowder.net/book-of-mormon-parallel-edition/"><img src="https://cdn.bencrowder.net/images/projects/parallel-edition/parallel-bofm-por-spa-sample.png?v1" alt="Portuguese–Spanish side-by-side edition" title="Portuguese–Spanish side-by-side edition" /></a>
        
      </figure></p>
<p>We’re starting out with the following editions, but I have more in the works. (Requests welcome!)</p>
<ul>
<li>Dutch–English</li>
<li>French–English</li>
<li>German–Dutch</li>
<li>German–English</li>
<li>Italian–English</li>
<li>Lao–English</li>
<li>Lao–Thai</li>
<li>Portuguese–English</li>
<li>Portuguese–Spanish</li>
<li>Spanish–English</li>
<li>Spanish–Italian</li>
<li>Thai–English</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="implementationdesignnotes">Implementation/design notes</h3>
<ul>
<li>Chrome has a <a href="https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/29061484/save-as-pdf-produces-documents-with-backwards-text?hl=en">weird</a> <a href="https://github.com/rsms/inter/issues/398">Skia</a> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/homebrewery/comments/8j3h44/text_is_mirrored_when_copied_after_exporting_to/">bug</a> where text in exported PDFs isn’t searchable/copyable, which was a dealbreaker since these editions are meant to be digital-only.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>Firefox also <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1779887">doesn’t respect</a> <code>break-after: avoid</code>, 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.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>Browsers still aren’t great at paragraph layout, so there are going to be occasional widows and orphans.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>If/when some of these browser issues get fixed (or I find workarounds), I’ll post updated files.</li>
</ul><hr class="feed-extra" style="margin-top: 48pt;" /><p class="feed-extra feed-mail"><a href="mailto:ben.crowder@gmail.com?subject=Re%3A%20Book of Mormon parallel edition">Reply via email</a></p>]]></description>
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