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Freely-Given.org has continued working with the Center for New Testament Restoration as they’ve now officially released the Statistical Restoration Greek New Testament (SR GNT). We look forward to seeing how researchers and Bible translators around the world make use of this new GNT in their research and publications. For us, the related Verifiable Literal Translation (VLT) has already been used to create first drafts of the Open English Translation Literal Version and work is also proceeding on the Readers’ Version. (Contact us if you’d like to look at the early drafts and send us your first impressions.)
Freely-Given.org has been helping the Center for New Testament Restoration as they’ve released the beta of the Statistical Restoration Greek New Testament (SR GNT) in preparation for the full release around the middle of the year. We believe that this will be a major blessing to the NT world (especially to scholars and students and Bible-app developers) having the best GNT freely available under an open licence. The related Verifiable Literal Translation (VLT) will form the base of the OET-LV work which is now planned to start in July.
Starting mid-January, we will be free to work on some long-held dreams for this site. And we’re hoping that you might be interested to volunteer to help us! We plan a focus on Bible translation tools and helps, along with narrowing down the design of the Open English Translation (OET) in January and getting started on the Literal Version after that. We also plan to start curating open-licensed Bible software and resources, so feel free to start sending us links to be considered. We’ll be posting regular progress reports on this page.
With a change in life circumstances coming up, we are expecting to be able to update and expand this site beginning in early 2022. We plan a focus on Bible translation tools and helps, along with narrowing down the design of the Open English Translation (OET) and getting started on the Literal Version. We also plan to start curating open-licensed Bible software and content, so feel free to start sending us links to be considered.
We are now hosting more public domain and openly licenced Bible Drop Box outputs as resources that you can download in various formats, e.g., WLC, KJV, RV, ASV, WEB, OEB, ULB, UDB, etc. You can see our new demo page here.
Finally we are able to release an early alpha version of the Biblelator USFM Bible editor software that should give an idea of where the concept is heading, and hopefully shouldn’t lose your work too easily.
Because we’re excited about the forthcoming SILE Unicode typesetting engine, we’ve gone ahead and incorporated a development version of SILE into the Bible Drop Box as the first step of working with the SILE team on eventually producing lovely 2-column typeset Bibles (PDFs).
Following on from the Haiola integration, the Bible Drop Box now goes on to convert the Haiola ePub export to a Kindle mobi file (thanks to Amazon’s KindleGen software).
The Bible Drop Box now runs USFM files through the Haiola export, thus making available an ebook, a different website implementation, and a different OSIS XML export. (It hasn’t been tested yet on other types of Bible submissions.)
FreelyGiven.info now also redirects to this site. Unfortunately, when making Android apps, it can’t handle the hyphen in Freely-Given so it was desirable to have a hyphen-free domain name as well.
The Bible Drop Box can now export Bibles into the Open Document Format (ODF) used by LibreOffice and OpenOffice and other programs. It creates fully-styled .odt files. So with only a few tweaks to the nested styles, you should be able to print a draft of a Bible suitable for your needs. In addition, this format provides additional paths for users to convert Bibles to PDF and HTML files.
Today we started a new page for Android Bible apps.
The Bible Drop Box recently implemented a low-tech PhotoBible solution for very cheap camera phones where the Bible text is rendered as small JPEG files which can be loaded onto a SD-card (approx 0.5 GB for a Bible) and viewed using the camera’s photo-viewing capabilities. (Our implementation technology only works for languages without fancy scripting needs unfortunately, and thus far, only for left-to-right languages.)
Today is Document Freedom Day, a day for the global celebration of information accessibility and open standards. The community behind LibreOffice, the leading free office suite, joins the celebration around the globe by participating in events and informing about the importance of truly free standards.
"With tens of millions of users worldwide using LibreOffice, we are one of the largest free software projects adopting and fostering open standards", says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of the Board at The Document Foundation, the charitable and vendor-independent entity behind LibreOffice. "We are proud to enable more and more users each day to make use of the free OpenDocument format, freeing them from the ties of proprietary solutions, and giving them full control of their own work and creativity. Our enormous success is only possible thanks to all those fighting for and promoting open standards, whom we’d like to thank for all their work and efforts", he adds.
LibreOffice is available for all major platforms in over 110 languages, driven by a worldwide community, and builds on the OpenDocument format as default file format, usable on desktop, mobile as well as web clients. It sees strong support from governments, enterprises and private users worldwide, and is available free of charge from here.
Finally after expanding the various Bible module import and output formats, we now have the prototype of a draft Bible layout produced as a PDF file with verse numbers on the outside of the text. More testing is still required to check that none of the text is missing and what formatting is deficient, but at least you should already be able to read the basic text (minus cross-references).
The Bible Drop Box recently had the first stages implemented for the two next Bible module formats: theWord (for Windows) and MySword (for Android). This is exciting for those wanting to get their USFM Bible translations into Bible study programs on various kinds of desktop and mobile computing devices. More development and testing is required to take advantage of all the available formatting features, but at least you should already be able to read the basic text.
The Bible Drop Box for USFM Bibles (in our software section) is slowly but surely being improved each week or so. (Other formats are not as well tested yet.) There’s still more work needed to be done than we have time for, but it is encouraging to see this service becoming more used. Recent additions include a basic statistics page (most useful for "translations in progress") and the beginnings of an HTML5 export. See the demo page here.
The Bible Drop Box is now able to accept other Bible formats as well as USFM. This is a place where you can "drop" (upload) a zipped Bible (complete or partial) and that will initiate an automatic sequence which will carefully check your files for errors and then attempt to convert them to different Bible formats (such as OSIS and a Sword Module), as well as attempting to create a demonstration SFM2Web Bible website. All this information is then accessible from a temporary private page on Freely-Given.org whose address will be emailed to you. (Your data is not made publicly available.)
The Bible Drop Box for USFM Bibles (in our software section) has now been successfully tested on over 200 different Bible translations. This is a place where you can "drop" (upload) a zipped Bible (complete or partial) and that will initiate an automatic sequence which will carefully check your files for errors and then attempt to convert them to different Bible formats (such as OSIS and a Sword Module), as well as attempting to create a demonstration SFM2Web Bible website. All this information is then accessible from a temporary private page on Freely-Given.org whose address will be emailed to you. (Your data is not made publicly available.)
Christian radio from Marton for Marton! Listen to Freely-Given FM on 88.3 and see our page here.
We’ve now been able to purchase a low-powered FM radio transmitter from which we hope to broadcast Freely Given FM from Marton (New Zealand). Watch here for further announcements.
Work has begun on a Bible Drop Box for USFM Bibles (in our software section).
At this stage, the basic infrastructure is set up and working, and we are hoping to improve the output each week as time permits. Feel free to try it out and then suggest improvements through our Contact Page.
This page last updated: 9-Nov-2022
Issued under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share-alike Licence, copyright © 2011-2022, RJH
