Spiritual Episcopal Church: The Book of Common Prayer, 1928 edition. V2. 19 January 2011.

[DTM]

This is the 1928 edition of the U.S. Book of Common Prayer, with the 1945 lectionary revisions.

The tables for calculating the date of Easter and other holy days are not suitable to be formatted for the small screens of handheld devices, therefore those sections have been omitted. Instead, I've included an Excel workbook that will calculate the Sundays and other major dates in the Christian year.

It is the policy of the Episcopal Church to release the Book of Common Prayer into the public domain once it has been adopted in its final form.

Suggestions for improvement (especially any actual text errors you may discover) will be welcomed!

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[DTM]

Version 2 posted: Corrected text errors in the Nicene Creed.

[eddiek]

Thanks for it Great share!

[RMOP]

Originally Posted by DTM

Version 2 posted: Corrected text errors in the Nicene Creed.

Thanks for much for making this available. I'm late to this thread, so hope you're still getting email notifications from new replies. It has been a while...but, I have a question:

The PAGINATION of the BCP is an integral part of its utility, and I wonder if and how it might be possible to have this wonderful work formatted so that the standard print version pagination is reproduced exactly for at least some specified screen sizes and resolutions (e.g., 8" tablet or actual Kindle). I'm thinking of something rather like the identical pagination which has been maintained between the Oxford university Press 1929 BCP and the Large Print version offered by DEUS Publications. Even though the "screen sizes" are very different, there's NO DIFFERENCE in page numbering or location of text on the page. Everything is where you expect it.

I quite appreciate that there are many difficulties trying to bring the aesthetics of the printed page into an eBook. Some have been done better than others, but the BCP strikes me as one for which the effort would be worth making. This BCP offered in this thread is carefully done, but my PC eBook reader wouldn't allow me to set the point size small enough to put the pages in sync with the hard copy.

Can anyone advise me on what might be possible? I'm quite willing to work on this particular text if there are some guides that can help me know what is and what is not possible.

Many thanks.

[DTM]

Yes, I'm still here and still getting notifications. It has been a long time; I was really surprised when this showed up in my Inbox.

I don't think there's any plausible way of doing what you want in an epub document. With hard page breaks, you might be able to get all of the content correct, page by page, but the layout within the page would be all but impossible to maintain. You'd have to use forced line breaks, and even then you wouldn't get justified text. And if your screen were too narrow or too small, you'd get all kinds of crazy line and page breaks. The intent of epub and other such formats is to have text reflow and soft pagination, so the result looks like a normally-printed document. You'd really be fighting the format.

Finally, if you were to be able to tweak it just right for a particular device, you might find all your work gets broken with the next software update. And with my luck, the device would be discontinued the day after I finished.

My version, as you see it on the screen, came out well, and I'm quite happy with it, but I was learning the format as I went. If you look under the hood, you'll see that a lot of what I did was patchwork. I'd never do it that way again, but every time I think about cleaning it all up, I recall how much effort it was in the first place and just decide to let it ride. That's all a roundabout way of saying that I won't be making any substantial changes.

I think that, if anyone wanted to take a crack at formatting it exactly, the best bet would be to go to PDF format. You then might find a device/app that can show each page as a whole. If that's interests you, go here for an absolutely magnificent version. (By the way, that site was my source for the text that I formatted into the epub, and that PDF was my reference for what it should look like.)

[RMOP]

DTM - Thanks for the detailed reply. It's what I anticipated but hope against.

[RMOP]

Originally Posted by DTM

I don't think there's any plausible way of doing what you want in an epub document.

I starting ruminating on this problem again, and having just reviewed some of the posts on fixed/static pagination and the intent of ebooks to NOT employ that, I'm still inclined to be pessimistic about the possibilities. HOWEVER, for a book that ALREADY exists in standard pagination across MANY different PRINT versions, I'm wondering if it's POSSIBLE that adjusting only the FONT size might give me what I want. Probably NOT, but that's the essence of what has been done with the standardized editions of the BCP. Turn to page 67 on ANY of the standardized editions, no matter how LARGE or how SMALL, and you are on the same page as everyone else. Just thinking out loud, not doing. And, you're right about the PDF version to which you linked. It's elegantly done. Too bad there's not way to get a similar effect with the BCP in an ebook.

[DaleDe]

What is required to maintain pagination is the Fixed layout ePub described in our wiki.

Dale