© 2021 Georges Michelson Dupont
© 2021 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
The 2019 printing (2,200 books) is sold out. A new printing of 2,200 copies is scheduled for September 2021. This edition will be different in its pagination.
¶ Little History.
Originally, in 1992, in order to facilitate the comparison of the revised French translation and the Spanish and Finnish translations with the original English text, it was decided to model their pagination on the original. Thus, the text on page 606 of The Urantia Book corresponded to the same pages 606 of the translations, in order to facilitate work in study groups and to have the same cross-reference for all translations. Given the fact that each translation is more or less long compared to the original, this layout work required resorting to tricks such as playing on the spacing of words and/or lines while respecting the spacing between certain paragraphs, thus ensuring the cohesion of ideas. Indeed, certain spacing between paragraphs underlines the end of a series of ideas, opens a new subject, or highlights a singular or important fact. The same goes for enumerations. All these spaces between paragraphs also give a certain visual airiness to the page and breathing room to the text.
¶ Today.
The difficulties linked to the use of several alphabets (Latin, Cyrillic, Asian, Hebrew, Arabic) and texts which are read from right to left or from left to right, make the work of identical layout increasingly difficult technically but also aesthetically.
After several years of discussions it was finally decided to modify the layout by letting the text “flow” naturally, leading to a change in the pagination. To facilitate the search for paragraphs from one version to another and from one translation to another, we modified the referencing system and inserted at the top of each page on the far left of even pages and the far right of odd pages the number of the issue, the section and the complete paragraph beginning the page in question. (see explanations below)
¶ Explanations
The paragraph at the top of page 481, beginning “You can try to imagine . . . ” is the twelfth in section 7. The Sources of Solar Energy which begins on page 480. It is referenced as follows: Paper 41: Section 7. Paragraphs 12 or: 41:7.12 which is indicated at the top right of the odd page.
Taking the initial idea of being able to easily compare a translation with the original text, we have developed an application on the foundation’s website www.urantia.org which compares any translation with another.
In the future, we recommend using the international reference system which is: Issue: section. paragraph. Example: UB 99:6.3. Note that after the issue number we place a “:” and after the paragraph number a point ". For those who send us their texts for publication, please respect these typographic codes which facilitate the layout of your quarterly publication.
Friendships.
G. Michelson Dupont