Introduction to Bibledit-Desktop
Bibledit-Desktop is a program that aims to help Bible translation be faster and more accurate. It is a full-featured application for doing Bible translation on the desktop (or laptop). It does not require a constant Internet connection to run properly.
Bibledit was designed for a purpose: To honor to God by making it easier to give people get access to the Word of God so they can be saved (Romans 10:17).
Features
- Native USFM text editor, several can be opened at once
- Project notes editor
- Chapter and book outline view
- Resizable and moveable windows
- Easy application of styles
- Styles editor
- Selection and display of project notes by various parameters
- Online help
- Backup and restore
- Import and export
- Resources display
- Spelling check
- Simple or more advanced interface
- Merge projects.
- Collaboration through USB drive, or through the Internet
- Interfaces to external programs including Xiphos and Bibletime.
Keeping in Touch
- We discuss Bibledit and the Desktop variation of the software on http://groups.google.com/d/forum/bibledit-general.
- Email subscriptions are possible. Mail the forum through bibledit-general@googlegroups.com.
- The archives from October 2013 and back of the previous mailing list are still available.
- Feature requests can be submitted at Github.. Bibledit formerly used http://savannah.nongnu.org/tasks/?group=bibledit.
- Bugs can be submitted through Github.
- Read more about code development or troubleshooting.
- There is also the bibledit-development mailing list. There you can subscribe, unsubscribe, view archives, etc. To subscribe to this list by email, send email to bibledit-development-request@nongnu.org, with the word "subscribe" in the subject line or the body of the mail. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe" to the same address. To post a message to all the list members, write to bibledit-development@nongnu.org.
- For announcements there is the bibledit-announce mailing list. There you can subscribe, unsubscribe, view archives, etc. To subscribe to this list by email, send email to bibledit-announce-request@nongnu.org with the word "subscribe" in the subject line or the body of the mail. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe" to the same address. To post a message to all the list members, write to bibledit-announce@nongnu.org. Only announcements should be posted to this list. This is to keep the traffic on this list very low.
Old Website
The old Bibledit website states that Bibledit-gtk, the desktop version of Bibledit, is out of date. But it is now supported once again because our dev team believes there is still a lot of life left in this desktop program. Our main users are not able to reliably connect to the Internet. Furthermore, this program has interfacing capabilities with other software that we use, like the premier Bible exegesis software on Windows, Bibleworks.
Programming Ministry
Code development on Bibledit is a ministry of Fellowship Bible Church led by Pastor Matt Postiff. We are working on it for not only a core group of users at Bibles International, but also to promote free, open-source Bible translation software on both Linux and Windows. Our goals are to expand Bibledit and help Bible translation to become faster and more accurate.
Help Wanted!
Help in developing Bibledit is welcome.
- Do you like writing good documentation? Your help is welcome to maintain the helpfiles of Bibledit.
- You know how useful packages are? Making packages could be the thing you would like to help with.
- Are you good at testing? Your feedback is welcome and suggestions for new features too.
History of Bibledit-Desktop
It started with an entry in the programmer's diary of Teus Benschop:
Friday 30 May 2003. I made the decision to move from Windows to Linux. God will help here, and the future will show why this decision had to be taken. A lot of programming needs to be done to move the Bible translation programs to Linux. I remember that at that time I had lost peace with God for a good while, was in great unrest of mind, and examined myself thoroughly to find out what it was, and then came to the above decision. It seemed to me a bit an unusual cause for this unrest, but nevertheless I could not find another one. After the decision was made and the actual move, I regained my peace. In 2004 some programming work was done that aided Bible translation work, and as I foresaw a greater future use for this program, I called it Bibledit.
After that God gave sufficient energy to work on the project in the spare time. Others started to contribute too, and the project moved forward to where it is now.
This continued until 2013 when Teus began to work on other branches of the Bibledit project, namely bibledit-cloud with all of its clients.
Matt Postiff picked up developing around 2015 to support Bibles International who was using the software to to do some of their translations. He began by fixing the Windows build environment using msys2, and fixing bugs that were basically due to bit rot. More feature requests began to come in from the user community, and here we are!