Is there a way to do tables in User Notes/Tools? Or insert a PDF?

[Bret Hicks]

I am fairly new to Accordance's user notes and user tools features.  I am actually slowly pulling in old study notes from Word and Pages documents in to user notes and tools.  As I was working on 1 John 1:5-2:2, I came across a table I had made of the possible wrong responses to sin, and the corresponding corrective given by John.  This leads to a couple of questions?

 

1.  Is there a way to create tables in user notes or tools?  

 

2.  If not, can I paste in a PDF into a user note or tool?

 

3.  If not, can I put in a link to an external PDF or other document within a user note or tool?

 

 

Thanks.

 

 

In Christ,

 

 

Bret

[Timothy Jenney]

I recommend composing tables in a word processor or spreadsheet, not Accordance. Even our full time developers find tables a headache. Save those tables in a File within your Documents>Accordance FIles and link to them.

 

Right now only User Tools will permit links to a file on a local drive or a URL. Check the Instructions in the Accordance Help for specifics.

[Bret Hicks]

Dr. J.,

 

Thanks.  Is there any plan to allow external links like that from user notes?  It seems somewhat silly for me to have to put a note in my user notes (commentary) saying, go to this user tool, which consists of a link to a PDF file of the table.  Are there plans to allow these in future versions of the notes?

 

 

In Christ,

 

 

Bret

[Timothy Jenney]

I agree, Bret.

 

Actually, this feature is on a list of improvements we'd like to add to User Notes (along with a few others!), but I don't know when it will be implemented.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

I recommend composing tables in a word processor or spreadsheet, not Accordance. Even our full time developers find tables a headache. Save those tables in a File within your Documents>Accordance FIles and link to them.

.

 

As someone who has requested table support in Notes and Tools before now I'm interested by this. I had assumed that regular Accordance modules supported tables just fine and that it was just a lack of infrastructure to support them in Notes and Tools. Is there some underlying reason that tables are a headache ? I had hoped we might see tables in UT/UN at some point.

 

Thx

D

[Timothy Jenney]

I am going to guess, Daniel, though any of our developers may be able to explain it better.

 

Accordance supports re-sizable panes, which force the text to wrap dynamically. Tables require enough horizontal space to display all of the columns simultaneously, which means they don't wrap very well.  The larger (actually, the wider) the table, the more difficult it is to display it in Accordance. I suppose we could just make every table an image and display only the thumbnail, but that means that we wouldn't be able to increase the font size or change the font of the text in the table. In addition, zooming in a table image means the font always starts to look pretty ragged at some point. 

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Thanx Tim. Yep there are issues with the reflowable and non-reflowable elements interacting, but this is basically a solved problem these days in various rendering engines. I really wouldn't like to see tables as images for the reasons you mention. But tables these days shouldn't really pose major issues. One could allow the document to be shrunk horizontally to a point and then introduce a horizontal scrollbar on the table. This sort of thing is common in browsers for example. There are other options of course.

 

Anyhow, I don't know how this is actually done in Acc but I'd love to see whatever issues prevent this support in UT/UN resolved. As you, might guess I have some documents which are table heavy which I would love to convert to user tools.

 

Thx

D