Project Runeberg's electronic edition of the Finnish Bible is based on the file uusi-T.gz, found at ftp.funet..fi on May 26, 1994. It has been transformed to the same format we use for Project Runeberg's electronic edition of the Swedish Bible (bibeln.txt). The following format description is a translation of the one used for bibeln.txt.
In our own source text, we use the ISO 8859-1 character set, but Project Runeberg's text are also distributed in other character sets to fit different platforms. The current electronic edition has no character attributes (boldface, italics, font sizes, fonts, superscript numbers, small capitals); it is as written on a typewriter.
The electronic edition uses one text column with long lines, up to 70 letters wide, rather than the common double columns with short lines. In the text, character position 1 through 6 is a margin used only for verse numbers. The period after the verse number is in position 4. Where the text is prose, it fills positions 7 through 70. Hyphenation is not used, but long words are moved to the next line. Only single spaces are used. The text is not justified to make a straight right margin. Tab characters are not used.
Some parts are poetry (e.g. Jes 9:2--21). There, we have indented the left margin two more positions. Jes 9:4 is poetry with pairs of lines. There, we have indented the even lines four more positions from the odd lines, thus 12 positions in all from the start of the line. Printed Bibles use continuation lines with even more indentation, but we have not needed to do that, because we fit more text in a line.
All printed Bibles have references beneath each verse, but we have not (yet) included these in the electronic edition. Footnotes are (sometimes) included, but since the electronic edition does not have pages, they appear at the end of each chapter. In the text and at the end of the chapter, the footnote is indicated by a digit in square brackets.
Paragraphs (where printed Bibles have a bold face capital) are
separeated by an empty line, but verses are not otherwise separated.
Large capitals at the start of chapters are not used in the electronic
edition. The first verse of a chapter is formatted just like the
other verses. Chapter summaries are centered. Their lines are about
40 characters wide. Before and after the summaries is one empty line.
The chapter name is also centered on its line, and contains the name
of the book.
Chapters and books are separated by lines with a special look. They
are introduced by an asterisk, followed by a codename, a space
character, and the name of the chapter or book. The codename is used
as a filename when the electronic edition is unpacked for Gopher menus
and similar purposes. The codenames are not shown in the menu.
Codenames that end in a slash "/" are used as names of file
directories, usually for a book, and that book's chapters will then
have codenames starting with this directory name followed by a slash
and the filename used for that chapter. One example is the name "40/"
for the directory for the gospel of Matthew and the name "40/05" for
the file for its fifth chapter.
