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Diagramming alignment


apull

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I was taught to diagram by alignment--lining up coordinating items and indenting subordinating ones, but the default alignment of the Accordance tool makes this difficult. It appears as if each word snaps to a grid point based on its center point, and therefore different length words don't align properly vertically.

 

Could you snap to the grid based on the leftmost character of each word, so they can be easily coordinated vertically? This would not seem to affect any of the other diagramming functionality, but would make my life much easier!

 

 

ie, ideally it would align (especially considering the snap-to alignment scheme that is set up)

 

__noun

____adjective

____adjective2

_______adverb

 

currently, it often shows up

 

__noun

____adjective

___adjective2

 

due to the odd length of adjective2. (See attached screenshot for further clarification)

post-11094-1201613990_thumb.jpg

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I am sorry, you are looking for tabbed alignment of the words to make a diagram, but the Accordance system is based on the American diagramming with symbols. We may support tabbing in the future, but we do not at present.

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I would look forward to Accordance supporting the kind of diagramming canvas the OP suggests. It would make my life easier as well.

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This happens to be a feature that I've been very interested in as well, although my desire isn't exactly as outlined by the OP it is very close. In particular, I've been hoping or something similar to what Bill Mounce refers to as "phrasing."

 

He outlines this in chapter 8 of his text Greek for the Rest of Us.

 

Peace,

 

Jeremy

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Thanks for the quick response--I understand the tool is designed to work with symbolic diagramming, but at the same time I doubt that left-aligning text on the grid would affect the current functionality negatively at all. (Or am I missing something obvious here?) In fact, it seems to me it would allow for a more precise placement of words on the diagrams.

 

Currently, each word lives in a little "box" (as seen when highlighted). These boxes snap to an invisible grid when they're moved--in 10 pixel increments. Unfortunately, the snap point is located at the center of this "box", which means that the left edge of the word can be located at different intervals, dependant upon the length of the word. (See attached example, where the bottom word snaps to x=10, 20, 30, etc, yet the top word snaps to x=14,24,34, etc)

 

This random inclusion of whitespace with some words (see bottom word in example) leads me to believe that there's no rhyme or reason to the exact placement on the grid of these words: if precision of placement was a priority, the program would conceivably trim whitespace before generating the little word boxes. In other words, the programmers needed an anchor, and they arbitrarily chose center.

 

If that anchor is changed to left (or right for Hebrew), the words could still be freely dragged for Symbol diagramming, and they could still snap to a 10x10 grid. However, for us "tabbed" diagrammers, now our words would also line up properly. As one who programs a little myself, I know that code is often a bit more complex than it looks from the outside, but this seems a *relatively* superficial change to make.

 

Thanks again!

post-11094-1201745545.gif

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The tabbed diagramming would be a nice plus to Accordance. Thanks for your analysis!

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