Freely-Given.org USFX Bibles

Picture of the FG Logo

More than you wanted to know about USFX Bibles

Unified Scripture Format XML (USFX) Bibles are usually created by a Bible conversion program such as Haiola. They consist of one XML file containing all of the available Bible books. USFX files use XML and Unicode (and particularly UTF-8) international standards. They only contain the Bible text and a few extras like book titles and introductions, but a lot of other necessary information (metadata) is not currently defined or included in the (still being expanded) USFX format, thus they are not sufficient for typesetting from directly.

The USFX specification can be found here but because this is basically a one-man operation (rather than a standard created by a group of organisations), changes can be made without notice.

Although USFX files are usually much better formed than USFM files, they can still contain errors which should be fixed before publishing. The Bible Drop Box software attempts to find and inform you of such errors and inconsistencies, at the same time trying to guess how to best handle them without just giving up. This may or may not be successful. (Your mileage may vary.) Of course, you will have the best result if you take the time to fix the issues in your original files.

Sample USFX files

You can view the Matigsalug demo USFX files here and the demo WEB USFX files here.

Submitting USFX files to the Bible Drop Box

You should compress the USFX file into a zip file. The filename must have a .zip extension. Take careful note of which folder you are saving your zip file into, because you will need that information in order to submit the file.

Test data: If you are able to provide any kinds of Bible files for automated testing purposes, please contact us and let us know the details so we can improve the internationalisation and ruggedness of the software for everyone’s benefit.