Notes on the Bahá'í Writings
This collection is a mirror of the authoritatively-translated and officially published Bahá'í Writings from the Bahá'í World Center ftp site, ftp.bwc.org. It expands on work done by Michael Kalantar, originally housed at
www.bcca.org/~kalantar/writings, and Mark Towfiq, originally housed at metalab.unc.edu/Bahai/Texts/English (both used with permission). Texts from the Bahá'í World Center ftp site are unformatted ASCII only; texts at Kalantar's, Towfiq's, and this site have been formatted for web posting. For provisional translations and other texts, return to the Bahá'í Academics Resource Library main page and select by category. On the copyright of these materials, see http://bahai-library.com/nsa/copyright.html.
Many of the Bahá'í Writings in this collection were originally taken
from an FTP site at the
Bahá'í World Centre.
The collection at the Bahá'í World Centre is both more
complete and more up to date (errors may have been corrected).
For further infomation regarding issues such as
file format and
copyright
see the README files at the
Bahá'í World Centre.
The Writings were converted to formatted text, as can be found at the downloads page, principally Glenn Pierce. Any books formatted by others will be noted as such.
In converting the Writings to
HTML,
errors may have been unintentionally introduced (this is work in progress).
If you have a question about something please compare it to the originals on
the FTP server.
A partial list of known problems is:
-
The original text used an ampersand (& to indicate words with diactrical marks (which
had removed in converting the words to ASCII text.
An effort has been made to replace these words with appropriate codes
if they exist.
In most cases the "&" has been removed whether or not an appropriate
substitution could be made.
- In all texts numbers may be missing (replaced by []).
- Page numbers (references) are missing or incorrect (they include more
pages than would be expected) in some places.
- Some of the pointers to return to the "Index" don't work properly.
Indeed, a number of different back pointer strategies have been
used -- each is experimental.
- There are footnote references (+F<number>) in the index to
Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh
- Hyphenated words in the original text are not elimiated; so they appear
disjointed in the converted text (see, for example,
The Promise of World Peace).
One of the members of the original Baha'i World Centre's Sacred Writings Proofreading Project explains some points regarding the original project whereby these texts were first made available at the World Centre in the late 1980s via BBS. The following points apply to any of the Sacred Writings online which haven't yet been put in htmt format:
- These files were saved in ASCII text.
- The files have no diacritical marks, but they have an ampersand (&) preceding each name or word that requires
one or more. It is up to each individual to search for these ampersands and
determine which diacritical mark or marks are necessary.
- Each paragraph begins with five spaces. This formatting allows for
them to be copied without any guessing as to whether a paragraph that ends at
the right margin of the page is actually part of the next paragraph. The
first thing I do when using these texts is replace the five space indents with
a Tab.
- At the end of each line there is a space. This allows people to do a
search-and-replace for the at the end of each line, replacing
them with a only. This results in word-wrap.
- One further note about diacritical marks in those texts: `Ayns at the
beginning of words are completely omitted, and they are replaced by an
apostrophe if found in the middle of a word. For example, `Abdu'l-Baha is
seen as `Abdu'l-Baha, and Mazra`ih is Mazra'ih.
Should you have comments or error reports, please send mail to:
-
If related to the original documents (from the FTP server at the
Baha'i World Centre):
etext@bwc.org
-
If related to the HTML copies found here: