How to publish it yourself

This page assumes that you have some technical background. If that's not you, no problem! You may want to read the publication overview.

What do I need to understand?

This page assumes a very basic familiarity with GitHub and a working knowledge of XeLaTeX. If you're not familiar with XeLaTeX: it's a computer typesetting system that creates PDF files. There are plenty of resources online to learn, but it does have a rather steep learning curve. (If you have friends in mathematics, science, or engineering, they may be familiar with it.)

The Technical Details

The data for the project are stored in a SQL database in the cloud. For publishing, the relevant data are placed into a GitHub repository. Then a GitHub Action runs XeLaTeX on the .tex file. These are the steps:

  1. The database is queried and all of the data are written to a JSON file.
  2. This JSON file is then converted into a .tex file.
  3. The GitHub Action converts the .tex file into a PDF.

If you want to publish the books on your own, you'll want to get ahold of those files. There are two ways you can get to the GitHub repository:

  1. The name of the repository follows a fixed format. It's always pub-XXXXX where XXXXX is the project ID. For instance, for the bhsa project, you can find the repository at https://github.com/openreadersbibles/pub-bhsa.
  2. From the “Projects” window, click the “Advanced...” button and then “GitHub.” The repository's GitHub page will open in a new window.

Suppose you are interested in the bhsa project, and the OT book of Jonah. You'll probably be interested in these files:

  • bhsa_OT_JON.json — The JSON data.
  • bhsa_OT_JON.tex — The TeX file generated from the JSON file.
  • openreader.cls — The LaTeX class file for the .tex file.

If you are investigating a problem in the build, you could also switch to the gh-pages branch of the repository, and examine the bhsa_OT_JON.log file.

Guide to the macros

Forthcoming...