Polari Bible

The code and data files necessary to build the Polari Bible as produced by the Manchester House of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Environment

The code is designed to be run on a Linux/Unix host. It requires the following:

• Python3
• Various Linux tools, particularly make and convert (from ImageMagick)
• LaTeX (TeTeX was used in development)
• Pandoc
• The typesetting uses Times New Roman so you will need to have the msttcorefonts package installed or otherwise mess with the font settings.

Building the Bible

The code should build by simply issuing the command

$ make

from the directory containing the various source and data files. To clean up after yourself you can also issue

$ make clean

Will it run on Windows/MacOS?

Windows

Probably not natively. You will need to install a Linux subsystem. The current version was built on Ubuntu 22.04 running under WSL2.

MacOS

Probably. You will need to install the various tools and packages using homebrew and probably mess with the Makefile. YMMV.

I want to make my own version of the Polari Bible

Rules of translation

Translation is controlled by a series of dictionary files. These contain a list of words and their translations.

At the moment there are two dictionaries: phrases and words. The phrases dictionary is read first. The dictionary files are in a simple format. Each line contains a word or phrase in English followed by a colon and then the translation in Polari.

If you want to add more dictionaries you can do so by adding them to the DICTIONARIES variable in the Makefile and also in PerformTranslation.py.

Altering the formatting, illustrations, etc.

This is trickier and you will need to understand LaTeX. The LaTeX template is in template.tex. But feel free to play around.