We present here the Book of Common Prayer in electronic form, formatted as the original. That is, it is intended to be as identical as possible to the U. S. BCP in appearance. It is hoped that parishes might find this useful, for example, in preparing special service booklets where unnecessary sections may be omitted, parts may be rearranged as needed so as to follow the actual order of service, or actual names (as in baptism or marriage) could be inserted. The text is in three word processing formats, RTF (Rich Text Format), which is recognizable by nearly all word processors, MSWord for Windows 97, and WordPerfect 6.0. The text is also available in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files, which look more like the original, but are not generally editable.
    If you have Firefox, Internet Explorer, or a similar browser, clicking on one of the RTF or MSWord links below will either call up a "helper program" (WordPad if you have Windows) or give a message box. Just click on "Save to disk" (or something similar) in the message box or helper program, and the file will be saved onto your hard drive. For the PDF files, you will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Once this is installed, clicking on a PDF file will automatically call up the Reader and you will be able to read the file, and save it onto your hard drive if you wish. If any errors are found please let us know. Suggestions for improvements are always welcome.

On 2 December 2007 the Episcopal Church officially began using the Revised Common Lectionary (with slight modifications) for Sunday Services. The Episcopal Church's Office for Liturgy and Music has produced replacement BCP pages containing the new readings.

Which files should I download? Basically, if you want to edit the text in any way, you should use the Word Processor (RTF, MSWord, or WordPerfect) files. This would be the case, for example, if you wish to make service booklets where the text actually follows the order of service, or if you wish to substitute actual names in the services of Baptism, Marriage, etc. If, however, you want an exact (printable) copy of part of the BCP, you should choose the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files.

Fonts now available for these files!  Highly recommended for use with the Word Processor files.

Table of Contents

[see below for single-file downloads]

Tables for Finding the Date of Easter and other Holy Days   880 

Daily Office Lectionary   934  
Seasons of the Year   936  
Holy Days   996  
Special Occasions   1000 

All the above files, ZIP compressed:

• WordPerfect format (size = 785K)
• RTF format (530K)
• MSWord 97/2000/2002 format (a single file - 700 K)

For the ZIP files, just click on the file you want and then choose "Save to disk" (or similar), and the file will be downloaded to your computer. You will then need to uncompress it using PKUNZIP, Winzip (if you have Windows), Stuffit, or a similar utility.

The entire Book of Common Prayer is also available as a single PDF file (rather than the many files you see above); size is about 4.5MB. It is also available as a single PDF from the Episcopal Church Center (size also 4.5MB).     

All the above files are also available in Adobe InDesign (.indd) format; contact me if interested.

Fonts: In order to minimize reformatting when using the RTF or WordPerfect files in a Word Processor, you will need to use the same font as was used in creating them. We have available for downloading a Garamond font for Windows which is both free (an important consideration!) and quite close in appearance to the font used in the U. S. Book of Common Prayer. It is a ZIP compressed file of four fonts of the Garamond family: normal, italic, bold, and bold italic. After downloading, you will need to uncompress it, and then install the files just as you would any other true-type font.
Note: the MSWord files use the same Garamond font which is part of the standard MSWord/MSOffice installation.

Download fonts (size=118K)

 
Sources / acknowledgements:
    The original text for these files was taken from ASCII text files produced by John Goodwin, Michael Bushnell, and others, in 1993. Typos present in the original files have been corrected as they have been found. Should you find any, please let me know so I can fix them.
    Thanks to Jay McWhirter for formatting the MSWord files.