One of the most interesting features of Roam Research is the ability to work on texts directly in one’s personal Roam database. This gives the ability to focus on particular passages and integrate the text closely with one’s own thinking and writing.

The aim of RoamPublic.com is to provide a directory of all the available public texts which are formatted for Roam.

If you know of any more texts which are available, please let me know. This is an early version of the site. More will be added soon, including instructions about how to export and import the texts. In the meantime, please follow @RoamPublic on Twitter or subscribe to the RoamBrain newsletter to be notified of new texts when they become available.

Working with texts

There are two ways to get texts into one’s Roam database: by copying or by importing.

Copying and pasting text is a quick option but this isn’t feasible for longer texts. In this case, texts can be exported from the original database (in a JSON format) and then imported into one’s personal database.

However there is a problem with importing some of the longer texts, where the content of some pages doesn’t appear on import. This is being looked at. However the King James version of the Bible is one of the longer texts that does import correctly.

In addition, the larger texts may well slow down your database. Conor White-Sullivan, the co-founder of Roam, suggests exporting “only the sections of these public Roams you are most interested in, so that Roam is still reasonably quick for you to load on mobile or with slow internet”.

Using databases

Roam Research is keen to encourage people to create public Roam databases. At the moment however, the company doesn’t have the ability to allow users to have more than 3 databases. So, for the time being, if you want to put up a public database, you will need to use one of the three databases you get as a user.

However, when Roam does allow users to pay for additional databases, there will also be an option to apply for free public databases to be added to your account.

 

Finally, thank you to Francis Miller who created this site and to Andrew Kirby, whose tweet about having a list of links to public Roam databases, stimulated the idea for this site.

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