We got an interesting suggestion today on our User Forums. Someone asked for a way to “tag” verses with information. For example, he wrote, “I may want to add the tag ‘Joy’ to a verse that speaks ‘joy’ to me, but doesn’t have that word actually in the verse.”

While Accordance does not currently offer “tags” per se, one way to accomplish this right now is to use verse highlighting as a kind of tagging system.

To use Accordance’s highlighting feature, the first thing you’ll need to do is open the Highlight palette. You do this by selecting Highlight palette from the Window menu.

HighlightMenu

 

In most Accordance installations, the Highlight palette will open with one predefined set of Highlights (My Highlights) containing one predefined style (a yellow style named Important). You can then add more styles to that highlight set, or you can create a new set of highlights for a specific purpose. In this case, let’s create a new set of highlights named Tags that we’ll use for tagging verses.

To do that, choose New Highlight File… from the pop-up menu at the top of the Highlight palette. In the dialog box that appears, enter the name “Tags” and click OK. The Define Highlight Styles dialog box will then open automatically so you can define the various styles it will contain. Once again, the default style is a yellow highlight named Important, but we’ll rename this first style Encouragement, change its Color to Cyan, and change its Shape from a thick bar to an underline.

DefineTagHighlights

As you can see, by changing the various pop-ups, you can create boxes, dashed lines, strikethroughs, etc. Once you have this first style set the way you want it, click the New button to add a second style. I’ll call this second style Joy, select Magenta as the Color, and leave all the other pop-ups the same. Next I’ll create a third style, call it Worship, and give it the color Purple. When I click OK to close the dialog box, my Highlight palette will now look like this:

TagHighlights

I now have three “tags” that I can apply to the verses I read. In my next post, I’ll show you how to apply those tag styles to individual verses.