Why is there No Simple Text File of the Standard Works?

I am a blind member of the church and have always had to settle for
partial participation in church and classes because I did not have an
ASCII text or "plain text" version of the standard works including
footnotes and Bible dictionary and Topical Guide etc., that I could open
on my small laptop.

Why has the church spent so much effort and money and time on
alternate versions of the standard works, when the most accessible and
most universally usable format is plain text. It can bee seen on a screen
by anyone, heard by one using a screen reader (blind talking software),
or felt by a deaf/blind user on an electronic Braille display and
navigated by people with mobility challenges on the myriad of devices
made for their purposes. You cannot do all that at the same time with a
Braille file or an HTML file, or a daisy book file, or even a Word document.
Those formats isolate the user to such little and narrow uses.

And please do not assume it is difficult to navigate around very quickly
in a text file that is thousands of pages long. The find function is
incredibly fast to use (not to mention the oldest and most universally
used method),especially when the church or even the user tags the text
with very simple textual tags. The blind andsighted alike have been
using the find function since the beginning of technical time as their
main way of navigating. And for goodness sake, it is the easiest file for
the church to put out on the web for download, or on a CD for
distribution

The file is already sitting on a computer in Church offices.
How do I know this? We must have had it first before we created the
Braille format file. The Braille format file was transcribed from an
ASCII text file using a special Braille translation program.

So lets get that file and post it. Why has this not been done earlier? It is
so easy, and so much more useful than those other files that took so
much hard work to produce. Washing seven times in the River Jordan
is so simple. Must we do some great thing to feel good about ourselves?
Let's do what works.

And please remember, I stronly recommend the
ASCII file that was used to make the Braille file. It has the footnotes and
such we need (unless the Church has an even more complete standard
works file).

Thank you so much! I dare say no one reading this message could know
how much this will mean to so many.


Now, let's see if I can find a way to see the graphical icon
below so I can choose it in the box below to send this message.

CJ Sampson

You did find the right icon, because your post posted.

But I'm scratching my head. I don't understand just how you are being limited by the current formats. You mention screen readers and braille files. So it would appear that what you need exists, but I'm not sure how that is stopping you. What are you using and what format does it need?

I've had a blind member in my class. She used some kind of braille PDA/small laptop and she kept right up and even read aloud.

Hi CJ,

You probably don't remember me, but unless I am mistaking you for someone else, we did a joint report on the Internet and accessibilty for Professor Gary Hatch's technology class in the English department at BYU some years ago. I see you are still agitating for accessibility.

I think that it would be great to have a plain ASCII verision of the scriptures available for download from lds.org. However, there is already an unofficial ASCII version (sans Bible Dictionary and Topical Guide) that has been floating around the web for years. You can download it from the following url via FTP:

ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdo ... uad600.zip

You may already have this version, because you explicitly requested a version with the topical guide and bible dictionary, which it doesn't have, but I thought I'd link it just in case.

Individual ASCII volumes (Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, KJV) are also available from the same FTP folder:

ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdos/mormon/

They are also available at:

http://ldsguy.tripod.com/Iron-rod/

I have often kept a copy of the ASCII Quad on my USB flash drive. It is especially useful when you need to copy and paste a few verses into an email, a blog post, a forum post, or a comment thread. When copying and pasting from scriptures.lds.org you have to go through and carefully remove the exteraneous characters added by the footnote markup. Pasting from the text file is so much easier.

The thing about ASCII is that it is so small and portable to the greatest number of platforms. That is why Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org) is one of my favorite sources for public domain e-texts. If the church would be willing to post an official ASCII version of the Quad, including the topical guide and bible dictionary it would be great. They could even consider releasing it on Project Gutenberg.

Another benefit of an ASCII version would be that it could be easily distributed and installed on older computers being used in developing nations where the internet is harder to get, and technology resources are limited. People in those countries could still benefit from an electronic version of the scriptures that they can search, even with limited, older technology and without internet access.

everyBody on same page wrote:I am a blind member of the church and have always had to settle for
partial participation in church and classes because I did not have an
ASCII text or "plain text" version of the standard works including
footnotes and Bible dictionary and Topical Guide etc., that I could open
on my small laptop.

...

In case it might be of some use to you (or someone else), I have a short C program that reads the files from the old floppy-based product the Church used to sell and produces a fairly clean ASCII test file containing the full text of the standard works. The result contains the book headings and chapter headings but not the footnotes or cross references. If you want the program, PM me. If I get swamped by requests, I could try to attach it here.

On a modern linux or unix-based system, the grep command on even the 7.6MB file is almost instantaneous. I also have a Perl script that takes references, "1 ne 3:7-9" for example, and returns a nicely formatted batch of the three specified verses. It handles a fair number of book abbreviations, verse range, chapter and verse combinations, etc.

I don't know what format the new CD-based product uses, so I can't say whether it would be feasible to extract ASCII from that. It shouldn't be too difficult to write a program to extract the ASCII text from the HTML on the Church web site. In fact, there are other threads about personal cross-referencing and scripture e-marking, and I think much of the extractor program is already done.

HTH

rmrichesjr wrote:It shouldn't be too difficult to write a program to extract the ASCII text from the HTML on the Church web site.

I've seen a commercial program, Mark My Scriptures that does something very similar. It goes on-line to the church website and downloads and converts the text for it's PDA program. I'm sure it was done to get around copyright issues, but it also makes a huge library available. As soon as the church posts next year's manuals, it's available to be loaded. No waiting for someone to convert it.

The problem with pure ASCII is while it's the lowest common denominator, it's also the most featureless.

I know that this reply comes 9-ish years late, but I found this thread a little while ago looking for the same thing -- a plain text download of the Book of Mormon. I wanted a plain-text copy so I could put it into my Microsoft OneNote and take much more detailed, tagged, and searchable notes/drawings/annotations, etc that I can always access on my computer or mobile gadgets. I couldn't find a decent plain text Book of Mormon that fitted my needs.

So ... I made one.

(*Lots* of copy-pasting from every page of the Book of Mormon on LDS.org into a spreadsheet and other columns to identify the book and chapters. )

Now, I have it. I'd be happy to share my spreadsheet of the Book of Mormon with anyone who wants it so you don't have to duplicate work. I thought that I could even post it here -- but then I realized that with copyright laws, I don't actually know the legalities of doing that. While I know the church would love to distribute the Book of Mormon far and wide, and it's freely available in many forms, is it going to be bad or raise any eyebrows if I create a link to my spreadsheet for people to download and use for similar purposes? I'd love someone's thoughts about this if you have any insight on the issue. I'm probably not the only one in the world who could use my plain-text/spreadsheet of the Book of Mormon.

Thanks.

I'm not well enough acquainted with the legalities and such, but another option would be to script or otherwise automate the copy-pasting so individuals could _generate_ their own copy in plain text or spreadsheet form. About six months ago, I started a personal project to write a Python script to convert the downloadable PDF scriptures to plain text. Other priorities quickly preempted that project.

(Edited to fix a couple of typos.)

I wish I had the skills to do write such a script. I work in healthcare and I'm not deeply technical, so I'm afraid I just had to do it the long and hard way. The work has been done (It took a few hours). I'm happy to make it available to others in my situation who can't write scripts to automate it (I could link to it in a public folder in my Dropbox) -- I just don't know if anyone would frown on that from a legal/copyright standpoint.

brettbkg wrote:I just don't know if anyone would frown on that from a legal/copyright standpoint.

You'd need to get permission to post it. You can find details at the bottom of the legal page.

The simple text of some older versions of the Book of Mormon are in the public domain, but the current text is copyrighted. In addition, all of the chapter headings, footnotes, and other materials, aside from the verses themselves, is under copyright. You can find versions of the Bible text that are not copyrighted, but again, with headings, footnotes, and other information, they come under copyright.

As russellhltn said, best to contact the Intellectual Property office for details.

There are also free software to extract simple text from PDF file.
Give a look to Internet.

Marianomarini, thanks for that mention. Perchance, are you aware of any of those free programs that can unravel the two-column format of the PDF files? Last I checked, the downloadable scripture PDF files are in two-column format, the same as the paper scriptures. The pdftotext tool I tried early this year did extract plain text, but the text was somewhat tangled due to the two-column format. To have usable plain text would have still required manual or automated untangling.

You can check VeryPDF, it can maintain even two column in the text file . I'll give a look.

No one answered the question 'why'. Lacking an answer from the church, I'd guess that it has to do with control of the copyrighted text.

There are lots of ways to 'hack' a text copy of the scriptures based on files you can download from lds.org/media-library/ebooks I will explain on relatively easy method below that doesn't require any programing nor scripting knowledge. But I will preface that with my worry that it is hard to guarantee the accuracy of the output. I would hate, for example, to generate an ascii copy of the text, and have there be errors in it, especially if sharing it with someone else. Anyway...

First, grab the epub version of the scriptures from lds.org. It appears that the epub versions don't have footnotes etc. to start with, which is what seems to be desired here.

Second, get a free and open-source program called 'calibre' . It is an e-reader/ebook manager that many people apparently like. I was able to easily install it on my linux based computer. It appears they have versions for macOS and Windows as well.. I installed in LInux using my distribution-provided package, something that the folks at calibre apparently recommend against, but it worked fine for me for this purpose.

Use the command line as follows:

where input and output are the base filenames. For example, to convert the book of mormon:
That will take the epub file book-of-mormon-eng.epub (downloaded from lds.org) and output a text file of the same name except .txt extension instead of .epub

You should be able to do that for each of the 4 books of the standards works, resulting in 4 text files. You could merge those 4 resulting text files into a single file using various means.

Note if you try to use the .pdf file as the source in the above conversion, the results may not be what you want, becuase it tries to deal with all the footnotes; and it appears there may be other problems as well.

Note I read about this calibre method here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/102458/ ... ext#102475

I hope this helps someone.

Update to my previous post:

The epub book of Mormon file I downloaded from lds.org today 30Oct2017 has no footnotes and converted beautifully to plain text as per my above post.

However the other epub scripture files on lds.org today all do have footnotes (contrary to my poor assumption). And the table entries for Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, and Triple combination all link to the same Triple combination epub file.

I'm in the process of trying to convert the Holy Bible epub to text but it is taking my less- than- powerful PC a very long time. I suspect it will try to handle the footnotes so may not produce the clean plain text.

I think there may be other non-lds resources out on the internet to get plain text versions of the Bible including the king James version.

For doctrine and covenants and pearl of Great Price, you may have to hack a little harder to strip out the footnotes etc

For what it is worth.

Excellent! Thank you for posting those pointers and instructions.

At least with epub it should be easier to strip out the footnotes and superscripts--and you don't have to deal with the two column format of the PDF files. Epub is basically a zipped archive of html files, based on XML. I think python ( and other languages) should be very capable to parse out the text.

ross.rick wrote:At least with epub it should be easier to strip out the footnotes and superscripts--and you don't have to deal with the two column format of the PDF files. Epub is basically a zipped archive of html files, based on XML. I think python ( and other languages) should be very capable to parse out the text.

Based on the epub files reportedly being HTML on the inside, another possible solution would be the html2text utility available for Linux and likely for other systems.

ross.rick wrote:No one answered the question 'why'. Lacking an answer from the church, I'd guess that it has to do with control of the copyrighted text.

There are lots of ways to 'hack' a text copy of the scriptures based on files you can download...

These are helpful techniques, and it's nice that you shared them. But everyone should be aware that content derived from copyrighted content is still under the same copyright restrictions as the original. So text obtained this way cannot be used in apps or published in other ways without specific permission from the Church Intellectual Property Office. But if it's for personal use, then you can use the derived text in the same ways you might use the original text.

brettbkg wrote:I wish I had the skills to do write such a script. I work in healthcare and I'm not deeply technical, so I'm afraid I just had to do it the long and hard way. The work has been done (It took a few hours). I'm happy to make it available to others in my situation who can't write scripts to automate it (I could link to it in a public folder in my Dropbox) -- I just don't know if anyone would frown on that from a legal/copyright standpoint.

I would love a copy of your spreadsheet if you are sharing. : ) My email is nahomie10@gmail.com

Plain text versions exist for Bible and Book of Mormon at Project Gutenberg.

King James Bible txt: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10900
Book of Mormon txt: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17 Also, PDFs can be downloaded from the church's website.
PDFs can be converted into text files using Adobe Acrobat Pro or various online PDF conversion tools.
Or PDFs can be converted into Word documents and then use Word to save it to a text file.

dobrichelovek wrote: Sun Jun 08, 2025 1:47 pm https://basic.churchofjesuschrist.org/study

The closest I can find there to simple text is a page per chapter or section. The text of a given chapter or section could be copied and pasted into a text file, but that would have to be done per chapter or section, and some formatting cleanup would still be needed.