Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Scripture / Book of Mormon annotation program?

Recently, I bought a new laptop. I'm on it a lot, and I thought, why not study my scriptures on it? I envisioned myself able to easily see cross references, highlight text, and make comments on verses. My problem: it's easy to read my scriptures on a computer, but not so easy to study. I just can't seem to find the software I want.

I had a PDA, but text entry on that was annoying, and it frequently lost my highlighting.

Features (in order of most to least importance):
  1. Display the standard works (Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price) on my computer (that is, I don't have to be online to read the information)
  2. free
  3. Highlighting verses
  4. Annotating text- allow me to write comments about verses
  5. let me see my annotations in a useful way/hide my annotations if I don't like them
  6. exporting - let me get my annotations out of the program and into a text file. This way, if I decide to go back to regular paper scriptures, I don't loose all my insights, I can just print them out and put them in a binder.
  7. book marks - let me mark where I am in reading
  8. Allow highlighting in multiple colors
  9. Hyperlinking - basically, if there is a footnote referencing a scripture, let me click on it and show me the scripture
  10. tagging - allow me to tag things I've highlighted. I could see myself tagging scriptures with "faith", then later, pull up a list with those scriptures
  11. fast verse look up (for use in a class, although really, I can't see myself taking my laptop to church)
Programs that sort of do this:
  • scrapbook firefox plug-in - not sure about exporting (but this is the best I've seen so far)
  • other plug-ins for the web (diigi et al)- seem to need to be online
  • adobe reader - might have size issues with a large file
  • microsoft word - might have size issues. also, I don't want to accidentally modify the text
  • mobireader - costs money for the books I want
  • scripture app - tags, saves annotations, but seems to be broken under firefox and ie. also, doesn't display highlights and the comments you make on scriptures are public. It's possible these problems are settings issues, but since it's broken under my browsers, I can't tell.
Issues:
  • copyright on footnotes
I'll keep looking and see what I can find (or talk my sweet husband into coding).

Updated I'm current2/11/09: I'm currently using mobipocket. see here