Bahá'í Writings in Electronic FormatsPrepared by Darren Hiebert |
This project is a labor of love and dedicated to Habib Riazati, a truly inspiring servant of Bahá'u'lláh. It was during a talk he gave in 1990, shortly after I embraced the Faith of Bahá'u'lláh, that Habib said something like this (according to my recollection):
"It won't be long before you will be able to carry all of the Bahá'í Writings in your pocket. At that time, it will no longer matter how great a scholar you are, or how good a memory you have, as everyone will have access to the same information and be able to call up whatever the Writings have to say on any topic. Then, what will distinguish us from one another is what we do with that knowledge."
It took ten years for technology to progress to the point where this has become possible. Hopefully, this project brings us closer to that goal of making the ocean of knowledge contained in the Bahá'í Writings available anywhere, anytime. I am pleased that I have the opportunity to utilize my talents in the pursuit of that goal.
You can reach me via email at
ebahai
@
DarrenHiebert
.
com
or visit me at my web site.
These texts were prepared from the raw ASCII texts made available from the Bahá'í World Centre. I have applied numerous corrections to, formatted, and hyper-linked those texts to provide them here in their current form. Further, I have added paragraph numbers where these have been approved by the Universal House of Justice.
In order to permit reference back to printed editions of the texts, page breaks in the original printed edition used as the source for each electronic text (usually the U.S. pocket size edition) are retained in the electronic text and displayed in bold type and enclosed by square brackets (e.g. [42]).
If you discover any problems or typographical errors in these electronic texts, or have any suggestions as to how they could be improved, please let me know and I will correct them. You can find my email address above, and in the electronic files, themselves. I have also included a revision date in the files to allow tracking of updates to the files.
Viewing these will give you an idea of the overall appearance of a given text and how it is linked. Good use of hyper-text linking is provided in the texts. The best example of hyper-linking is The Kitáb-i-Aqdas (this link takes you to the HTML version).
This is an excellent reader providing excellent link navigation features, with the ability to define custom bookmarks. It also provides the capability to store its books onto secure digital (SD) and compact flash (CF) cards on supporting devices. It currently costs $20 to license this program.
Provides an extremely nice looking presentation. However, it is very slow and link navigation is crude.
New texts will appear as they become available.
Textual updates (content or formatting) will be reflected by the Revision Date.
| Title | Revision Date |
Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HTML | iSilo Reader |
Microsoft Reader |
|||
| All titles below | 26 Sep 2006 | html.zip | isilo.zip | lit.zip | |
| Bahá'u'lláh | |||||
| Epistle to the Son of the Wolf | 08 Jun 2003 | esw.html | esw-isilo.pdb | esw.lit | |
| Gems of Divine Mysteries | 08 Jul 2006 | HTML | iSilo | Reader | |
| Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh | 08 Jun 2003 | gwb.html | gwb-isilo.pdb | gwb.lit | |
| The Hidden Words | 08 Jul 2006 | hw.html | hw-isilo.pdb | hw.lit | |
| The Kitáb-i-Aqdas (The Most Holy Book) | 08 Jun 2003 | aqd.html | aqd-isilo.pdb | aqd.lit | |
| The Kitáb-i-Íqán (The Book of Certitude) | 08 Jun 2003 | iqa.html | iqa-isilo.pdb | iqa.lit | |
| Prayers and Meditations | 08 Jun 2003 | pm.html | pm-isilo.pdb | pm.lit | |
| The Proclamation of Bahá'u'lláh | 08 Jun 2003 | pb.html | pb-isilo.pdb | pb.lit | |
| The Seven Valleys and The Four Valleys | 08 Jun 2003 | svfv.html | svfv-isilo.pdb | svfv.lit | |
| The Summons of the Lord of Hosts | 08 Jul 2006 | HTML | iSilo | Reader | |
| Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh | 08 Jun 2003 | tb.html | tb-isilo.pdb | tb.lit | |
| The Báb | |||||
| Selections from the Writings of The Báb | 08 Jun 2003 | swb.html | swb-isilo.pdb | swb.lit | |
| `Abdu'l-Bahá | |||||
| The Secret of Divine Civilization | 08 Jun 2003 | sdc.html | sdc-isilo.pdb | sdc.lit | |
| Selections from the Writings of `Abdu'l-Bahá | 08 Jun 2003 | sab.html | sab-isilo.pdb | sab.lit | |
| Some Answered Questions | 08 Jun 2003 | saq.html | saq-isilo.pdb | saq.lit | |
| Will and Testament of `Abdu'l-Bahá | 08 Jun 2003 | wt.html | wt-isilo.pdb | wt.lit | |
| Shoghi Effendi | |||||
| The Advent of Divine Justice | 08 Jun 2003 | adj.html | adj-isilo.pdb | adj.lit | |
| The Promised Day is Come | 08 Jun 2003 | pdc.html | pdc-isilo.pdb | pdc.lit | |
| Universal House of Justice | |||||
| Century of Light | 08 Jun 2003 | cl.html | cl-isilo.pdb | cl.lit | |
| The Promise of World Peace | 08 Jun 2003 | pwp.html | pwp-isilo.pdb | pwp.lit | |
| Compilations | |||||
| Bahá'í Prayers (1st edition) | 26 Sep 2006 | bp.html | bp-isilo.pdb | bp.lit | |
I did not convert the texts by hand. I wrote pattern-matching conversion scripts in Perl tailored to the peculiarities of each text and wrote a transliteration table, which automates the conversion of the diacritically marked words (these two tasks are where the labor is). Then I run the scripts on the original texts to convert the files automatically.
Currently, all available files will together occupy approximately 6 MB on a PalmOS device, and 8.4 MB on a PocketPC. If you don't have enough available space, you can select just those texts which you really want.
I selected the iSilo reader because it has the best support for hyper-links that I have found, in addition to more compact storage of its files (allowing you to hold more books).
I have also done some work preparing the writings in Palm Reader (formerly Peanut Reader) format, since the Palm Reader is available freely. Unfortunately, I am having some problems with the hyperlinks in some of the documents working correctly (they lock up the device when selected). When and if I get things working with this reader, I will make files formatted for it available. However, the markup language for the Palm Reader is fairly crude and doesn't permit as nice a visual presentation.
I am also looking into formatting the writings for use in Plucker, a free reader for PalmOS.
The bidirectional links generated between the text of the Aqdas and the Notes were done by using the passages quoted in the notes as a pattern with which to match the corresponding text of the Aqdas. It was not possible for the note passages to match the text of the Aqdas if page numbers appear in the middle of the Aqdas text being matched. Therefore, I had to strip out page number information from the text in order for the pattern matches to operate successfully. I am still searching for a way to work around this problem.