Pray Latin

About

Pray Latin is an application helping with praying in Latin and learning Latin prayers.

It displays prayers in your own language inline to help understand the Latin text which in turn allows to quickly learn prayer in Latin.

It contains large collection of prayers in Latin and other languages and it can be used as daily prayer book.

This is an open source software available online on the project development site.

License

Source code is available under AGPLv3 License.

Contact

You can contact the author of the app by sending an email to address: devel@praylatin.app or you can submit request online on this project development website: new Issue

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any problems using the app, suggestions for new features, improvements or correct mistakes.

Translations

The app already has UI translation to a few languages. You can submit a new translation in your own language. To do so, please create a copy of the translation file in your language and submit as a new issue. It will be added to the project after review.

New prayers

If you have suggestions or ideas for new prayers to be added to the app, please send me an email or open a new issue as described above.

However, the best way to have new prayers in the app is to submit them in ready to use format as yaml file. This reduces the amount of work for the developer and allows for quickly adding new content. If you are interested in contributing new prayers, please continue to read below to learn about the prayer file format.

Prayer file format

Prayers are stored in Yaml format. It means the file has a specific and strict structure. This is to make it possible for the app to display prayers line by line with translation interlines of the prayers.

The prayer content can be formatted using Markdown. However, some sophisticated formatting or markdown tags may cause unexpected result in the displayed content. Therefore, it is recommended to avoid overusing formatting. Typically, you want to use bold or italic to highlight some parts of the text.

Except the prayer content, there is some additional information required and some optional. So, please pay attention to include all required information, otherwise the prayer will not load in the app.

Basic prayer information

Mandatory prayer information:

1. title is the prayer title in the same language as the prayer content
2. lang is the 2-letter code of the prayer language, for example: en
3. language is the full name of the prayer language. The language name must be in the native language, for example: Espanõl
4. lines is the prayer content split into individual lines. It does not matter how the prayer is split. However, what matters is that in all languages the prayer must be split the same way to translation displayed inline makes sense and matches the main prayer content. As the prayer is displayed on small devices like mobile phones, each line should be relatively short. It easier to read and pray if each line is a full sentence or part of the sentence that makes sense on its own.

Prayer file example

title: Ave Maria
lang: la
language: Latina
lines:
  - Ave Maria, gratia plena
  - Dominus tecum.
  - Benedicta Tu in mulieribus,
  - et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
  - Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
  - ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
  - nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.

Additional and advanced options

Content formatting

In the example above we can update the prayer content with some text formatting using Markdown. While most of markdown formatting is supported and should work I highly recommend to avoid overusing formatting. Some formatting, like links in the prayer content while they work, they may cause displaying issue.

Also, some formatting tags may require to put content in quotes. Here is an example:

title: Ave Maria
lang: la
language: Latina
lines:
  - __Ave Maria__, gratia plena
  - Dominus tecum.
  - Benedicta Tu in mulieribus,
  - et benedictus fructus ventris tui, __Iesus__.
  - "**Sancta Maria**, Mater Dei,"
  - ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
  - nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.

This will result in the following prayer formatting:

Ave Maria, gratia plena
Dominus tecum.
Benedicta Tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.

Please note, when stars: '*' are used for formatting, the line must be in quotes.

Advanced and optional prayer information

1. tags allows to assign tags or labels to the prayer which is then used for prayer grouping on the list. This helps with finding prayers on the long list in the app.
   Example:

   tags:
     - Basic
     - Blessed Virgin Mary
   

2. links allows to provide links related to the prayer. Right now, only links to youtube are allowed and supported. Adding links, will display links below the prayer content.
   Example:

   links:
     - type: youtube
        title: Ave Maria by Luciano Pavarotti
        url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpYGgtrMTYs
   

3. notes allows to add additional information about the prayer which is then displayed below the prayer and links in the app. Notes tag allows to add free form content, formatted using markdown tags.
   Example:

   notes: |
     The prayer, also known as the Hail Mary, is a central devotion in the Roman Catholic Church. 
     The prayer has two parts, with the first part coming from the Gospel of Luke and the second 
     part added in the 15th century. It is commonly recited in private and in public, 
     and is said 150 times as part of the Rosary.
   

4. dates allows you to specify dates for the prayer. These are dates for which the prayer is recommended. For example, Joyful Rosary Mysteries are recommended for: Monday, Thursday and Saturday. Litany of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is recommended for the month of June and so on.
   The format for putting dates is based on crontab file. You can find more details on this here.
   This is not yet implemented in the app.
   Example:

   dates:
      - "* * * * 1,4,6"
      - "* * * 6 *"
   

Non standard formatting and advanced content techniques

There are some non-standard formatting tags which are not defined in Markdown spec but available to use while preparing prayer file.

Embedding prayers

Some prayers contain other prayers text as part of it content. For example prayer The Angelus Prayer (Angelus Domini):

Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae
Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto.
Ave Maria, gratia plena
Dominus tecum.
Benedicta Tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.

Ecce ancilla Domini,
Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.
Ave Maria, gratia plena
Dominus tecum.
Benedicta Tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.

Et Verbum caro factum est,
Et habitavit in nobis.
Ave Maria, gratia plena
Dominus tecum.
Benedicta Tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.

As you can see Ave Maria is included several times as part of the prayer. We could prepare the prayer file like this with Ave Maria text included as many times as necessary but this solution comes with a few problems:

1. It is a lot of work to include the same prayer many times
2. It takes a lot of space
3. If you want to change something in the included prayer you have to do it multiple times
4. Mistakes are easy to make and difficult to find and correct

For this reason we have prayer embed tag: '@prayerfile' which allows you to point to a file from which a prayer must be included in the content. For The Angelus Prayer the file can look like this:

lines:
  - The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.
  - Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto.
  - "@avemaria"
  - 
  - Behold the handmaid of the Lord.
  - Be it done unto me according to thy word.
  - "@avemaria"
  - 
  - And the Word was made flesh.
  - And dwelt among us.
  - "@avemaria"

This makes the file much smaller and overall content much shorter and easier to manage. When the app displays the prayer it automatically includes the Ave Maria prayer from specified file and includes it in the content of the main prayer.

This tag has a variation: '@@prayerfile', note the double '@@'. In this variant, the included prayer title is also added to the content. With a single '@` only the prayer text is added. This variations is sometimes useful when creating prayers lists.

Empty lines

Normally when we prepare prayer file like in previous example, the empty lines are removed from the rendered text. And all the text is displayed line under a lines. This sometimes makes it harder to read the text. For readability it makes sense to add an empty line to the displayed text, to separate sections of the content. To add an empty line which is displayed you can use ^^^ tag.

Using this, the above example looks like this:

lines:
  - The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.
  - Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto.
  - "@avemaria"
  - ^^^
  - Behold the handmaid of the Lord.
  - Be it done unto me according to thy word.
  - "@avemaria"
  - ^^^
  - And the Word was made flesh.
  - And dwelt among us.
  - "@avemaria"

For more practical examples, formatting and tags, please take a look at existing prayers files.