txt or flash player scriptures

[tannerj1332-p40]

Does anyone know where I could find a .txt document or a flash document for the scriptures?

[rmrichesjr]

I got my plain-text copy of the standard works several years ago by writing a custom program to uncompress the old product the Church sold on about 14 floppy disks--but I did not do the footnotes or study aids. If you happen to have a readable copy of the floppies around, I'd be happy to send you my program.

There have been many postings about downloading the scriptures and converting them to various formats. There may be a multi-step process that can get to .txt or Flash. One fairly recent posting mentions a web site that may be useful. Here's the posting:

http://tech.lds.org/forum/showpost.php? ... stcount=19

Here's the web site:

http://www.scripturebrowser.com/

It appears you could download everything from this site that you would need to produce a plain text version. There may be other postings in that thread or in other threads that may be useful.

There's also http://scriptures.lds.org/ if you prefer footnotes as hyperlinks.

[tannerj1332-p40]

Yes, that link was for if you could browse the web on your device, but I do not really have the time, patience, or skill to convert something like that to flash or txt. I was kind of hoping for something that was already made. But thanks anyway.

[rmrichesjr]

Conversion from HTML to txt is trivial using the program called html2text.

[carljokl]

The Church is interested in maintaining copyright. I am not sure how happy the Church would be about text based versions of the scriptures floating around.

Creating text based versions of the scriptures is not a big challenge. As part of my work on the JavaME scripture reader the source data is in XML which my code parses into a hierarchy of Java objects. As part of the development process, for the purpose of debugging I can dump out the text of that hierarchy. This has been important so that I can visually inspect that the code is working correctly and nothing is being missed etc. That text is being dumped out to the console to be inspected by myself. It could go to a file but I would not make any such text based copy of the scriptures unless explicitly told that I was authorised to do so.

In summary, the technology already exists but it is a matter of policy and ability to maintain copyright etc.

[rmrichesjr]

I am definitely not an authoritative source about policy matters, but I had understood that downloading and storing scripture content from the Church web site (http://www.lds.org) to your personal computing devices is allowed for an individual's own personal use. From the Rights and Use Information on the online scriptures pages:

You may view, download, and print material from this site only for your personal, noncommercial use unless otherwise indicated.

My interpretation would seem to be consistent with earlier postings on this forum, including these:

http://tech.lds.org/forum/showpost.php? ... stcount=18

http://tech.lds.org/forum/showpost.php? ... ostcount=4

http://tech.lds.org/forum/showpost.php? ... ostcount=3

http://tech.lds.org/forum/showpost.php? ... stcount=18

[russellhltn]

I am definitely not an authoritative source about policy matters, but I had understood that downloading and storing scripture content from the Church web site (http://www.lds.org) to your personal computing devices is allowed for an individual's own personal use.

As I understand it, that is correct. It is the redistribution that would land someone in trouble.

[tannerj1332-p40]

Conversion from HTML to txt is trivial using the program called html2text.

Where can I find this program and how much does it cost?

[tannerj1332-p40]

Never mind I found the program, but that can only convert one page at a time; it would take forever to convert each page separately.

[scgallafent]

Never mind I found the program, but that can only convert one page at a time; it would take forever to convert each page separately.

Most operating systems have a way to run a script against multiple files. Since the Windows syntax is ingrained in me:

Code: Select all

for %v in (*.html) do html2text %v

It's not something I typically do on my Linux box, so I can't regurgitate that one from memory.