Has anyone considered the usefulness of importing the Bible into Devonthink. I’m a pastor and so am always copying passages into a Word document. It struck me how much easier it might be to do all my work inside Devon, especially if I could link to passages instead of pasting them into a document.
But the task and the method of cataloging the Bible is rather daunting. You would want to be able to call up given verse by Book:Chapter:Verse. So each individual verse would need to be a separate rich text document. Either titled with Book:Chapter:Verse or in folders Book>Chapter>Verse. I think the first way would be better.
I wonder if their is a text version of the Bible that is parsed into verses so that it could be imported fairly easily.
Like I said, a rather daunting task. But one with great potential benefits for those of us who use the Bible regularly.
I don’t know of a Bible already divided anywhere.
But somewhere earlier on this forum, Christian said that a “divide documents” feature might be coming. That would do what you want. Sorry I can’t find the post.
Divide documents is something I would like, too.
jeffreyclong,
Have you tried the FREE Mac Online Bible? devon-technologies.com/phpBB … =5555#5555 ). But, with such a huge and complex text as the Bible, I imagine that using a dedicated Bible application might be the best way to go, importing sections and notes into DT as you research… am interested if you figure anything out though…
in my opinion, if you want to do serious bible study/research, you need a dedicated app with the right tool set. i see two problems with importing the bible into DT.
first, once you have it there it’s now divorced from other associated tools that could work well with it. unless, of course, you import those tools and create the links.
second, since dedicated apps have already done this, this seems like a non-value added task to me, re-creating the wheel, so to speak.
When I switched from PCs to Macs I looked for good bible software and ended up purchasing Accordance and I’m very happy with it. I have no desire whatsoever to move any of it into DT. I can instantly call up book/chapter/verse, i can do concordance-based searches, as well as a ton of other search types as well as auto linking with the associated tools (word study aids, maps, commentaries, etc…). it is very well done.
I think DT can be a great pastor’s tool for containing research and perhaps notes. You could use it for storing sermon texts, although if I was actively writing sermons I think I’d look at Ulysses for that instead.
I’m using Devonthink as well & just wondered whether you might have found a good way of searching for Bible references in your Devonthink database.
E.g. I want to find a talk or some notes on John 6:51-18, but I don’t want to find all the docs with just the word ‘John’ in it, and docs on John 6 might be useful, as might docs on John 5-8
If you can produce a text file containing the verses with an empty line between them, it would be simple to split it into files at each verse. If you could also somehow produce such a file with the verses separated by an empty line and with the first line of each verse containing eg Book:Chapter:Verse, one could write an applescript for something like BBEdit or textwrangler (which is free) that would split the verses and eg add them to DT under appropriate folders or something similar (or add tags, if they were working).
I have no idea if automatically producing the text file in the appropriate format is possible. if any of this bible software that has been mentioned in this thread is scriptable, that should also be possible.
at any rate, if you could somehow produce such a text file I could write the scripts if you want. “Should be a piece of cake ™.”
ps: splitting a file at eg paragraph breaks can be done with a script someone has already posted some time ago.