This is a project to maintain Tamil Ecumenical Bible in Unicode. The aim of this project is to make online Tamil Bible resemble as much as possible to the print edition. More specifically poems and quotations to resemble the print edition. The bible that is used for this purpose is the 2012 edition.

A live demo is available here. You can also like us on facebook.

• A MySQL database.
• A PHP library to access and retrieve information.
• Unlike other online Tamil Bibles, poems and quotations are displayed as they are in the print edition (that is they are formatted like poems and not like paragraphs).
• Options to enable Red letter version of the bible is added. The logic to highlight red letter verses is in the code and not in the database (see redletter.php).

• PHP 5.4+ and PDO extension (Installed by default)
• SQL database, preferably MySQL (but works with many others too)
• The Medoo library - (Included in the library)

• BibleLib folder contains PHP library to access and display the database

• MySQL folder contains the MySQL dump of tables.

  • t_book_key.sql - Intro text, Book name for each book in the bible in various formats
  • t_verses - Contains bible verses
  • t_verseheaders - Contains headers
  • t_redletter.sql - Contains instructions for colouring the words spoken by Christ in red
  • t_crossref.sql and t_footnotes - Contains cross-ref and footnotes of the bible
  • t_errors.sql - Contains list of known typographical errors. This list can be found here
  • mybibleview_dyn - Contains view definition for merging all the above table in production so that it will be faster to process and retrive information
    • Please note that if your server does not allow you to create views, then follow the instructions at noviews.md

• Unicode characters like ❮, ⁾, ₎, ␢, ⦃ and many others are used in the verses stored in the database to enable us to format the verses properly. The complete list can be found in bibleConfig.php

• Please read the comments in the code defore customizing.

After a long analysis, I decided to use verse ID system of scrollmapper/bible_databases. It is simpler and more effecient. Each verse is accessed by a unique key, the combination of the BOOK+CHAPTER+VERSE id. Example:

• Genesis 1:1 (Genesis chapter 1, verse 1) = 01001001 (01 001 001)
• Exodus 2:3 (Exodus chapter 2, verse 3) = 02002003 (02 002 003) The verse-id system is used for faster, simplified queries. For instance: 01001001 - 02001005 would capture all verses between Genesis 1:1 through Exodus 1:5. Written simply:

SELECT * FROM t_verses WHERE id BETWEEN 01001001 AND 02001005

• Since Unicode characters are in the middle of verses, search function will not work properly if more than one word is used.

If you find any bug or suggest any improvement, please feel free to raise a pull request or contact me. You can also contribute by proof reading the bible. Check out our home page for more information.