lining up verse

[Peter E]

I am evaluating Accordance as a future purchase. In playing around with the demo copy, I like how you can set up parallel panes. One thing that I was surprised by is that there is no option to line up the verses. Since you can have each verse separated, it seems logical (and useful) to have the panes line up the verses so you can just scan across to compare versions, or compare the Greek/Hebrew with a translation.

 

Granted, the verses are usually close to one another, but I found it a bit frustrating to have to look at the verse references to make sure I was comparing the correct verses.

 

Am I missing something? If there isn't an option to line up the verses, I'd like to submit that as a feature request. What do you all think?

 

Thanks,

 

Peter

[Joe Weaks]

What you say is great if all the panes are set the same to Display Verses with Space. It'd be neat if it contained leading where necessary so that the verses line up all the way through the current display, but that only makes sense if all panes are restricted to Verses with Space. For what happens once another pane is set to Verses (not with space), not to mention another to Paragraph? Then no syncing of course, cause you've clearly chosen not to. But then, how do you know which one is made primary, too? The current text display flexibility starts to make your suggestion (which makes sense in a limited scenario) a bit more problematic.

That said, I think the always-sync-the-verse-at-the-top solution seems to be the best one. I suspect the Accordance folks have already gone through this thought process and arrived at this conclusion/solution.

 

Maybe there could be an optional behavior, the logic of which was something like: "For all panes set to Display Verses with Space, have all verses' leading adjusted as necessary to keep them lined up."

 

My bigger disappointment is that parallel tool windows do a pretty poor job of keeping parallel verses in line with each other.

[jpkang]

I agree this option would be nice, and have mentioned it before to the developers, though I don't find that it really bothers me in practice to find the parallel verse/phrase/clause between columns. In fact, I think I would probably find myself annoyed if such an alignment frequently resulted in too much white space because of verse-ending orphans.

 

It's probably worth mentioning that when you print (to PDF or hardcopy) that it does align them as I think you want.