Sojourner

A Bible for the COSMIC desktop that reads to you.

Sojourner opens the World English Bible (the publisher's Updated edition) like a book — a cover, the publisher's preface, every book from Genesis to the glossary, with the Deuterocanon shelved after the New Testament, on pages of a fixed size that turn rather than scroll — and reads it aloud, verse by verse, with a voice that runs entirely on your machine. Verse numbers and note markers are links: click one and a panel opens on that verse and its cross-references, and you can follow a reference to the next verse and the next, with breadcrumbs back to where you started, while the page you were on stays put.

It is being built in the open and is not finished. What works today:

• The whole text, every word the publisher shipped: 83 files, 38,058 verses, 1,956 footnotes, the translators' own cross-references, the Deuterocanon, the glossary. Proven word for word against the publisher's own rendering (cargo test). The divine name is set as the publisher sets it, "LORD" and "GOD" in small capitals.
• 344,799 cross-references from openbible.info, every one resolved against the text.
• Reading aloud with a local neural voice (Piper's LJ Speech voice): Play/Space reads the chapter, the verse being spoken is highlighted and kept in view, Shift+Up/Down go back a verse or skip one, and a chapter that ends runs on into the next.
• The names of scripture said as the dictionaries say them: a table of 682 names generated from two sourced pronouncing dictionaries (the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary and Chambers's 1908 "Pronouncing Vocabulary of Scripture Proper Names"), so "Job" is the man, not the work.
• Pages: each chapter is typeset onto sheets of one size in Gentium Book Plus (SIL's face for scripture, Open Font License, compiled in — the publisher sets its own edition in Gentium), justified, with a running head and a page number, and split between lines the way a printer would (no single line left behind, no heading at the foot of a page). The text is measured by the same engine that draws it, so every machine sets the same sheets, and cargo test pins the count: 4,653 sheets at the default size, none overflowing, nothing lost or doubled in the dealing. Ctrl+plus and Ctrl+minus change the text size; the sheets are set afresh.
• A Contents sidebar, the trail panel; it opens where you left off.

Not yet: a Flatpak, settings beyond the text size, and the 2,900 rarer names neither dictionary has.

Where the words come from

Sojourner does not author scripture. assets/SOURCES.md records every piece of text, data and voice it uses — who made it, where it was obtained, its hash, its license, and what Sojourner does with it — so that anything on screen can be traced back to its source. Nothing is changed; where the app reorders (the Deuterocanon) or renumbers (two places in the cross-reference data, both explained by the translators' footnotes), that is written down too.

Sojourner's own code is GPL-3.0 (see LICENSE). The text is public domain, the cross-references CC BY 4.0, the voice's dataset public domain, the typeface under the SIL Open Font License — those licenses belong to the data and are recorded with it.

Building

Rust (edition 2024) and, on Pop!_OS or Ubuntu:

sudo apt install cmake clang libclang-dev libsonic-dev libasound2-dev

Two files are too large for the repository and are obtained separately; assets/SOURCES.md has the URLs and the hashes they must match.

# The voice model (114 MB), beside its committed card and config:
#   assets/voices/en_US-ljspeech-high.onnx
#   from https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices, en/en_US/ljspeech/high/
# ONNX Runtime 1.28.0 for Linux x64, extracted under assets/onnxruntime/:
#   https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/releases/download/v1.28.0/onnxruntime-linux-x64-1.28.0.tgz

cargo test      # the proofs: text, cross-references, pages, phonemes, the reader, the voice
cargo run

Without the model and runtime the app still opens and reads as a book; only the voice is unavailable, and it says so.

Installing

To have it on the desktop like any other app — in the launcher, with its icon, opening where you left off:

chmod +x tools/install.sh
tools/install.sh              # builds the release binary, installs under ~/.local
tools/install.sh --remove     # takes it out again

The script puts the binary in ~/.local/bin, the desktop entry and icon where the desktop looks for them, and the voice's files (model, ONNX Runtime, espeak-ng data) under ~/.local/share/sojourner, which is where the app looks when it isn't run from a checkout. PREFIX=/usr/local (with sudo) installs system-wide; DESTDIR stages for a package.

Installing it as an app

tools/install.sh            # builds the release binary and installs under ~/.local
tools/install.sh --remove   # takes it out again

That puts the binary in ~/.local/bin, a launcher entry and the icon (the cover) where the desktop finds them, and the voice's files under ~/.local/share/sojourner, which is where the app looks for them when it isn't run from a checkout (src/voice/files.rs). PREFIX=/usr DESTDIR=… lays the same files out for a package.

Name

A sojourner is one who stays a while in a place that is not their home.