Straight Truth Press, and the case for independent translation.

Straight Truth Press is a small, independent imprint based in Lubbock, Texas. We publish Bibles — paraphrases, study editions, and translations into modern English — and we build the tools we use to make them.

Scriptorium started life as a stack of Word documents, a spreadsheet, and an evening's worth of frustration. We had a translation project in motion, a reviewer on the other side of the country, and no good way to keep track of what had been changed, by whom, and whether the change had ever been approved. The Word documents kept losing their formatting. The spreadsheet kept getting out of sync. We started writing a small tool to fix the problem for ourselves.

Two years later the small tool had become Scriptorium. It does what we needed it to do: hold a translation through every stage from first draft to typeset book, without losing anything along the way. We decided to publish it because we knew other people doing the same kind of work — almost always alone, almost always without institutional support — and we didn't want anyone else to live through the spreadsheet phase.

The next great English translations are not going to come from the committees. They are going to come from the people who care enough to do this work, often alone, often unfunded, often with day jobs.

That isn't a controversial claim once you look at the history. The English Bible has always been propelled forward by individuals — Wycliffe, Tyndale, Coverdale — and refined by committees afterward. The lone scholar who knows the original languages, who has thought hard about register and idiom, who has lived with the text for decades, is a category that has produced more translations than any institution. The internet, the public-domain originals, modern lexicography, and decent typesetting tools have made the work accessible to far more of them than was possible a generation ago.

Scriptorium is for those people. We do not have a theological program — we are not interested in adjudicating which translations are correct, or in steering you toward our preferred renderings. We are interested in being useful to anyone, of any tradition, who is doing this work with care.

What we believe about software.

We think tools for serious work should be quiet, durable, and unfashionable. Scriptorium is a desktop application because a desktop application can be relied on a decade from now. It writes plain files to your disk because files outlive any company that produced the software that wrote them. It works offline because — when you are seven hundred verses into Isaiah at midnight — the network is not your friend.

We will probably never sell Scriptorium to a private-equity firm. We will probably never make it a SaaS. If we ever cease to maintain it, we will release the source.

A short word on privacy.

Scriptorium itself does not collect telemetry. It does not phone home. It does not check for updates unless you ask it to.

If you turn on AI Review, your verse text is sent to Anthropic under their privacy terms; nothing is sent to us. If you turn on Cloud Sync, your project is end-to-end encrypted with a key derived from your password — we cannot read your translation, even on our own servers. If you sign up for the macOS or Linux waitlist, we keep your email until your platform's beta opens, and then we delete it.

If any of that changes, we will tell you.

Contact.

Questions, bugs, feature requests, theological objections, kind words, all welcome:

General: [email protected]
Press inquiries: [email protected]
Post: Straight Truth Press · PO Box 5114 · Lubbock, TX 79408