Introduction

Standard Format Markers (SFMs) have been used for many years within the Bible translation community for marking the elements within a digital Scripture text. Over time the backslash-based syntax (\) was used in diverging ways. In 2002 a working group within the United Bible Societies produced a specification for a single SFM dialect which facilitated the validation and sharing of Scripture content between teams, organizations and technologies. That specification was called Unified Standard Format Markers, or USFM.

With version 3.1, USFM (Unified Scripture Format Markup) standardizes a single content model which can be equally expressed in backslash-based \ format markers (USFM-FM), XML (USFM-XML), or JSON (USFM-JSON). The common abbreviation for these expressions are USFM, USX, and USJ.