A new service | Orthodox Presenter

penanko

Blessings of the Feast of Pentecost!
A friend and I have been working on this project for some time and would love your feedback

https://github.com/dbishai/orthodox-presenter
https://orthodox-presenter.com

ShareTheLord

God bless your service penanko! I like the open source idea.

If you don't mind me asking, what's the source of the texts? And was there an effort to merge efforts with CopticReader in order to not have duplicated work and divergence of sources and translations?

penanko

This site has played an instrumental role regarding content found on Orthodox Presenter. As far as reaching out to anyone, no.

minatasgeel

It looks like you are using unicode coptic....but the placement of the jinkum is still a  problem as usual. 

penanko

Correct. That was something that proved to be an issue.

minatasgeel

Opentype is the solution. I have been working on it, and i have a "working" font...but it never work smoothly with Office word. So I am losing interest :-)

blessedtobeawitness

@Penako - Looks like you're making great progress. The choice for Unicode for Coptic & a permissive Open Source License are very exciting.

Are you accepting contributors?

Quick thoughts based on experiencing streaming from Coptic Reader over TVs:

• The fonts are not adjustable; I know you can adjust the font size via browser, but it might make sense to add the function to the UI to make it easier for people to use.
  
  
• Scroll based navigation can be tricky to use during a service; especially on tablets. It'd be great to see a click driven presentation mode like Coptic Reader has.

Another thing to consider is the choice of Bible. I've heard from the priests at my Church that the Holy Synod has mandated which translations are acceptable for use; you might want to clear the use of the UKJV with your Bishop before you make this project too available.

Some additional Bible Resources to assist:

LXX2012: Septuagint in American English 2012 - Public Domain License
https://ebible.org/eng-lxx2012/

 - This is an update to the Brenton English translation of the Septuagint. It's in the same vein as the UKJV; modernized English.

Arabic Van-Dyke Bible - Public Domain License
https://ebible.org/arb-vd/

King James Version + Apocrypha - 1769 Edition, Public Domain License
https://ebible.org/kjv/

 - Digital Files of the original KJV. Public domain in the US, but technically Crown Copyright applies in the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version#Copyright_status

Thank you for all your hard work. May God reward you for this awesome service.

penanko

@blessedtobeawitness 

To answer some of your questions...

1. Yes. Ideally, the more people contribute, the better. All we ask is that you abide by the Contributing guidelines located on the project site.

2. The features that you mentioned are actually already implemented in Orthodox Presenter. Pressing the "Theme" menu will allow you to change to the light color theme as well as adjust the size of the font. 

In addition to this, presentation mode was recently released and offers a simple slide view controllable with left and right arrows keys.

The addition of the Holy Bible is something that is in the works. Thank you for the information that you provided and please feel free to contribute to the project.

blessedtobeawitness

@penanko

Thanks for responding. I definitely missed the Theme menu options; I'll check this out.

I tried out Presentation Mode, and I noticed that it's periodically cutting off the bottom of sentences. I meant to update my comment to reflect that; sorry about that.

I'll review the contributor guidelines and see if I can pitch in.

mabsoota

certainly you should use the orthodox study Bible, it has all the deuterocanonical books. the new testament is from new king James version (so needs just slight modernisation of the english) but the old testament is a new and very good translation and everyone should use it in my opinion :)

penanko

Thank you for your recommendation @Mabsoota. As you can imagine, the NKJV as well as the Orthodox Study Bible is copyrighted by Thomas Nelson so aquiring a license is alittle difficult. This is something that would be a great addition to Orthodox Presenter but has proved to be difficult to get. Through God's grace we hope that it could be something achievable as the user base grows.

Remember this service in your prayers and thank you for your input.

mabsoota

would a licence be very expensive? maybe there are people in your area who would be happy to contribute to that.

it is disappointing that we have to rely on less accurate old testament translations in printed orthodox Christian sources, when we have all the books translated from the septuagint into modern english.

on another note, i would love to get hold of a modern arabic translation of the septuagint with deuterocanonical books, but i hear this has not been translated yet from the greek, syriac and coptic. i hope it will be in my lifetime, as this would greatly increase the understanding of theology of a very large number of arabic speaking Christians.