Tags for verses

[Rick Conklin]

Good morning to all.

 

A number Mac applications allow me to add "TAGs" to whatever it is. I can add a tag or tags to my to-do in Things. I can add a tag(s) to photos in Aperture.

 

My wish is that I can easily add a tag or tags to a verse in Accordance. Then of course I could easily sort or filter for the verses that had that tag (or tags) attached.

 

In Things the tags are nested in a very nice way.

 

** This is not the same as doing a word search ** 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.

 

Any chance of that in the future?

 

... Oh, and the tags would also move back and forth to iOS whenever I would synch the desktop version and the iOs versions. Yeah, I want the moon.

 

thanks

 

Rick Conklin

Wichita, KS

[David Lang]

Although Accordance does not currently support tags, you could effectively "tag" verses right now using either User Notes or Highlighting.

 

With user notes, you could create a User Notes file named Tags that you just use to give these kinds of labels to. When you want to tag a verse, you would click in a verse reference, use the keyboard shortcut command-U, then type "joy" in the edit window and click Update. When you wanted to find all such tagged verses, you would open the User Notes file and search it.

 

An even better approach would be to use verse highlighting. Create a highlight style and call it "joy", then when you want to tag a verse, select the verse reference and click on the joy highlight style. That style will be applied to that verse in all translations.

 

Later, when you want to find all your "joy" verses, use the Style command to search for that highlight style.

[David Lang]

Rick, I was looking for a topic for an Accordance blog post, and you graciously supplied it. See this post for the first part of a tutorial on how to do what I'm suggesting.

[Ken Han]

I use the highlight for just this purpose. For the most part it works alright, with a few caveats.

 

Usually entering tags in apps like Yojimbo or Aperture is as simple as typing, even if the specific tag was never used before. With highlights one needs to create a new highlight style for each tag. If one uses the same tag repeatedly, no big deal other than the initial defining of highlight style. But if one is using highlights extensively for tagging, then this doesn't scale well. As it is my highlight palette almost fills the entire height of the screen.

 

I've probably had more problems associated with the highlight file than anything else in Accordance. They seem to get corrupted at random, and when that happens, if I'm lucky, I need to track down the uncorrupted older version of the highlight file in Time Machine. When, for whatever reason, that is not possible, the downside is significant as you would lose whatever work you have put into highlighting completely.

 

I never thought about tagging in Accordance, but the OP made me realize that's what I'm using the highlight for. I'd be interested to see how this discussion evolves.

Edited May 3, 2012 by rev.ken.han

[Rick Conklin]

The above suggestions are the best we have right now. However, the applications that use tags (Things for example) are elegant and simple. They also allow ultra easy filter. Please consider for future revs.