Bible+ Bibles

Download Premade Bibles | Creating Your Own Bibles

General Rules QuickVerse Instructions BibleWorks/Unbound Bible Instructions Sword Project Instructions
Online Bible instructions Seedmaster Instructions Creating Your Own Creating Fonts

Creating Your Own Bible (General Rules)

You'll generally need to download a copy of BibleConverter (the most recent is YCHBibleConverter), as well as the BibleConverterManual and BibleConverterBookNumbers from the Bible+ Files page . BibleConverter is also available from Crosswire . Additional notes regardng conversion can be found on J. S. Park's site . Also, please be aware of copyright laws applicable to your jurisdiction and any jurisdiction you may travel to. In jurisdictions where copyright laws are lax or unenforced, remember to "Do unto others...." Finally, this paragraph contitutes ethical opinion, and should not be construed as legal advice. I am not licensed in any jurisdiction to practice law.

For your ease of use, you can click here for the book numbering/naming conventions which will make it easier to create the abbreviations for the Jump page within PalmBible+.

Creating your own with QuickVerse (Commercial) or The Online Bible (Commercial)

(There are other Online Bible instructions below...) You can use BibleFormatter to convert QuickVerse (for PC) Bibles into Bible+ format.

Creating your own with BibleWorks (Commercial) or Unbound Bible (Freeware)

Apparently, BibleWorks allows users to export (File -> Export with type "Text") bible versions. BibleWorks claims to include 90 translations in 28 languages, plus 9 original language texts... almost 100 total texts that can be used with Bible+. Michael Neuhold has written a program to convert these exported texts into a format that can then be converted (using BibleConverter) to Bible+ format. J. S. Park's site has an Unbound Bible correlation file and other tools to make the converted text compatible with the currently accepted Book Numbering system. Please be aware of copyright issues when exporting Bibles for use with your Palm.

Creating your own with The Sword Project (Freeware)

The Sword Project gives away more Bible versions and Commentaries than you can possibly imagine, and you can convert any of the unlocked versions. However, the process is somewhat complicated, and I'm in the process of getting permission to distribute these modules. In all likelihood, the following versions will be available soon:

In any case, if you do undertake one of these conversions and post the result on the web, please let me know so I can link to it.

If you're not scared off after reading these directions, here's how you can roll your own until I convert the versions that you're interested in. I'm assuming you run Windows:

  1. Download and install The Sword Project Starter Pack
  2. Follow these instructions to download the versions and commentaries you're interested in.
  3. Download Diaspora.zip and unzip it in the Sword Project directory (probably C:\Program Files\CrossWire\The Sword Project )
  4. If you don't have a Java2 Virtual Machine, you'll need one of those too. Download the "JRE" here . If you don't know whether or not you have it, open up a Command prompt (Start->Run "command" or Start->Run "cmd") and type java -version . If it comes back saying something like Java (TM) 2 Runtime Environment , together with some other stuff, you're set.
  5. Now you need BibleConverter. Get it from Bible+ Files or Crosswire . Unzip it somewhere; it's easiest if you just dump it in the sword directory.
  6. Run Diaspora.exe from the Sword directory.
  7. Select on the left the modules you want to export. Henceforth, I use LITV as an example.
  8. Under Format, select PBR.
  9. Press "Output Files"
  10. After it is finished exporting, it will create a .txt file; in my case LITV.txt.
  11. New! If you want footnote support, I think Diaspora puts footnotes out in the format ([number] text). If you want to convert these to my footnote style, download a copy of Perl and run perl -ne 's/\(\[\d+\] ([^\)]*)\)/{ $1 }/g; print;' LITV.txt > LITV2.txt (where LITV.txt is the original, and LITV2.txt is the new file. Then run bibleconverter on LITV2).
  12. Go back to the command line (Start->Run "command" or Start->Run "cmd") and type java BibleConverter LITV (subtitute LITV with the name of the Bible you're converting). On occasion it may complain about the input file, and give you a specific line number. Go to that line and fix it up. If you can't find the problem, you can insert a bogus tag (such as <I>) and see if your tag occurs before or after the problem its pointing out.
  13. After all your hard work, you should be rewarded with a pdb.

Creating your own with The Online Bible (Commercial)

Alex Pruss has built a converter for texts from The Online Bible . Dave has written some instructions for making sure Revelations shows up on the jump screen; you can also use fixrec0.

Creating your own with Seedmaster (Commercial)

Scott R. Walde has written a converter and instructions for converting Seedmaster and possibly "Bible Companion Software" modules to Bible+ format.

Creating your own otherwise...

Of course, you can also roll your own, possibly by using a text you already have. I haven't done much with BibleConverter, other than to convert a few bibles for my personal use, so I'll be of little help. Some of the online bibles may be fairly easy to automatically parse, although manual intervention may be needed to eliminate the mistakes in the computer import. Please be aware of copyright issues when downloading content from such online sites.

Creating Fonts for Bible+

Bible+ gives you the ability to create fonts for easier reading of the text within Bible+. To download fonts, just go to the files area and download the latest version of Bible+, which contains many premade fonts. If you would like to create your own fonts, you can download the font converter program from here.