I’m pleased to announce version 2.0 of my Book of Mormon study edition.

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.

Matthew Butterick posted a link today to Quad, his in-development typesetting engine, written in Racket. It’s an attempt to take the best ideas from both LaTeX and web browsers and build a modern, flexible typesetting engine.

The syntax (at least as it stands right now) is naturally very LISPy, and the examples are fairly low-level, but I’m quite interested to see where things go. While I haven’t done much typesetting lately, I’ve been itching to do more in LaTeX and less in InDesign, so that my source files are plain text and not locked into a proprietary format. And some things are more easily done in code. Also, I’ve wanted to share the source files for my work (as I’ve started doing with the PlotDevice sources for my language charts), but putting InDesign files in a GitHub repo just feels wrong. And InDesign isn’t exactly cheap, either.

So, LaTeX for now, and possibly Quad once it’s matured a bit.