For years now, we've gotten requests, usually from people migrating from other Bible programs, for an "interlinear" view. That is, rather than viewing multiple translations in parallel vertical columns, they wanted to be able to view them in horizontally oriented rows. In Accordance 8, we've added the option to toggle between vertical and horizontal panes. Just click the pane orientation icon to the right of the Details button.
If you want to be able to read more than a verse or two at a time, Accordance's default of vertical columns is really your best bet. However, horizontal panes come in handy when you want to compare small sections of text in a wide variety of texts. By displaying a single verse or two in horizontal rows, your eye can vertically scan to find corresponding words among different translations. Consider the following screenshot for example:
In this window, I have four Bible texts with key numbers (the ESVS, NAS95S, KJVS, and NIV-G/K), one English Bible without key numbers (the HCSB), and the tagged Greek New Testament. As you can see, I'm using key number highlighting to make it easy to see which words in each translation correspond to the Greek word under my cursor (biastai). Yet even in the translation without key numbers (the HCSB), my eye can very quickly find the corresponding word "violent."
While I usually favor vertical panes, horizontal panes are extremely useful for these kinds of word by word comparisons among texts.
# posted by David Lang @ 10:24 AM
