Scattered bits and copyright

I decided I want to make an app and figured oh what is a cool one to make, likely a Bible app because you know that is useful and there must be so many resources available...

Turns out that the majority of Bibles are copywritten. Aside from that they have very few actual developer resources available. On top of that formats that are seemingly open use some format called USFM, and one of the main apps people use for translation - Paratext - is absolutely horrendous and definitely not made for a person to just go ahead and edit or export a document as you might expect.

Paratext honestly baffles me, and I guess I have never been so thankful for the existence of GIT after a mere 5 minutes in that software.

Anyhow, so far I have found out that the Bible translations and versions use a custom file or document collection format called USFM, this is also not exactly the standard as I found two more formats that seem to do similar things.

What do they do exactly? Well it is a mix of markdown with styling syntax. The styling is really up to the software it seems so frankly it is just a fancy shorthand form for Bible similar to what markdown is for the web.

I honestly can't say why it is the main thing being used but it seems to have a lot of consideration for nuance in text which is fair game I guess. It feels like regex for styling text basically. So borderline unusable by the looks of it.

Fortunately there is one API available that I can see for many of the truly free versions although because it follows this USFM format and attempts to at least store this meta-data , albeit verbosely, the data goes from a few MB to a couple of Gig. They do say that is for all the English versions so I guess I will know a final data size if I do the effort to download and parse a single version.

Which I figured an API could provide, hence it exists, but then again I am aiming for offline first so not really their issue I can just hit the API until I have cloned and normalized the data I want.

So generally speaking the whole Bible verse seems to be partially stuck in 1999 when it comes to access , even for end users, if you strip the couple of main sites that do deliver whichever version then you are stuck in a world of word and pdf documents. Rather sad really.