Printed copies of the specification are available for a nominal fee from the STEP Administrator, Peter Bartlett at Loizeaux Brothers Publishers.

In the rapidly changing world of software development and electronic publishing, it should go without saying that this document tends to lag reality. Anyone who is actively developing STEP books or STEP software should not be doing so without being in contact with BSISG through the STEP Administrator so that they can be kept up to date on the latest developments.

A log of changes is included on the last page of this document.

Supplementary Information for STEP Developers

There are a number of algorithms and data tables referenced (but not fully described) in the STEP specification that are important to proper implementation of STEP. Parsons and NavPress have integrated these into the Programmers Toolkit DLL's. In the past, this information has been made available for the asking to anyone attempting to implement STEP without using the Programmers Toolkit. We are now in the process now of uploading all of this information to the BSISG web site. You'll find those files listed below.

The Official STEP Specification, Version 1.1

Updated on June 5, 1998. (If you are a Bible software user you don't need this document to take advantage of STEP compatibility in your Bible study library. This specification describes how book publishers can tag books for processing by the STEP Conversion Program and the binary format of the resulting files. Downloading this file will not give you the capability to create your own STEP books unless you purchase the STEP Publishers Toolkit or else you are a very talented programmer with lots of time on your hands.)

Choose STEP 1.1.doc (437K) or STEP 1.1.zip (110K).

Bible Verse References - Details and Aliases

This is a large table detailing exactly what verses are included in each of the 102 Bible books listed in the STEP specification. It further shows the correspondence between translations containing different versions of the same book. For example, 3 John in the NRSV has one more verse than 3 John in the KJV, and Daniel in the NAB (Catholic Bible) has more verses in chapter 3 than Daniel in the KJV. This information is not needed unless you are creating your own STEP-compatible software.

Choose brefspec.txt (851K) or brefspec.zip (210K).

Concordance and Word List Compression Algorithm

Details on implementing the bit vector compression scheme used for concordance and word list compression are now integrated into the spec as Appendix B.

Appendix B.doc (31K)

MM.DAT Compression Code

Details on implementing the multimedia "BLOB" file are now in Appendix D of the spec.

Appendix D.doc (23K)

Language Sort Orders

Appendix F now contains sort orders for the supported languages.

Appendix F.doc (87K)

STEP 2.0: Bibles in STEP; Language Enhancements

The version of STEP implemented in Parsons' QuickVerse 5.0 includes some small changes to make it easier to publish Bibles in STEP. An outline of the design issues in this version of STEP was distributed in December 1996 and discussed at the annual BSISG meeting in July 1997.

This version of STEP includes the ability to use non-English words in SyncTo's and Leveln commands as was discussed at the April and July 1997 BSISG/STEP meetings.

These two aspects of STEP 2.0 are detailed in Preview of Changes to STEP for Version 2.doc (190K) (Posted June 29, 1998)

STEP Fonts

The Publishers Toolkit recognizes Greek, Hebrew and Transliterated text entered using three public domain True Type fonts. For convenience, these fonts are also used in some of the documentation, above. Note that these are just the .ttf files; you must load them into Windows in order to use them. (Hint: Try Fonts on the Control Panel.)

STEP Fonts.zip (38KB) (Posted June 29, 1998)

If this is in Greek: Greek, and if this is in Hebrew: Hebrew, then you already have the fonts. If not (i.e. you see the word "Greek" and the word "Hebrew" above), you still may have the fonts... it could be that your browser doesn't understand how to use them.