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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 https://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:
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:
  1. These files were saved in ASCII text.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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:

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