Coptic Bible Hub
A leather-bound Bible for the Coptic Church that you can read, highlight and write in, by hand.
What it is
A reading, writing and study app for the Coptic Church on iPad, iPhone, Android and the web. It opens on today's date in the Coptic calendar and the day's Katameros readings, then turns into a real-feeling book: you turn pages by the corner, highlight words and write in the margins or in ruled space you open between verses. Around it are reading plans, achievements, the Church Fathers on each verse and anonymous questions answered by verified priests.
Why I built it
I wanted something to read Scripture with a pencil in hand, the way many of us read a paper Bible: underlining, writing between the lines, coming back to it later. I also wanted it to belong to our Church, so it opens on the Coptic date and the day's Katameros readings, and it lets you see what the Fathers said about a verse.
How it works
Pages are drawn with Skia, so the text layout, the ink, the highlights and the hit-testing all share one geometry. The same code runs on iOS, Android and the web, and a highlight lands on exactly the same letters everywhere.
Every stroke is saved against its verse (for example ink:JHN.3.16), with coordinates measured from that verse. Change the text size, rotate the iPad or open space above it and the page is laid out again, but your handwriting stays beside the words you wrote it on.
The highlighter snaps to whole words, and going back over highlighted words takes them off. Each highlight also stores which words it covers, so it lands on the same words when you switch between the four bundled translations.
Pen strokes are filled outlines whose width follows Apple Pencil pressure, with the edge smoothed so it doesn't wobble. Pages turn like paper: the corner you hold is carried to your finger and the page folds along the line halfway between them.
The whole book is laid out to know where pages break, but keeping a text paragraph for each of Psalms' roughly 2,500 verses used hundreds of MB and the iPad killed the app. Now only each paragraph's height is kept, and drawable paragraphs are rebuilt when needed, with at most 900 alive at once.
Everything works offline and syncs to a small self-hosted Hono and Postgres server. The same server runs anonymous Ask a priest: answers come from verified Coptic Orthodox clergy, and no one, not even the priests, can see who asked.