We’re pleased to announce another free update to Accordance for Mac. Version 9.6 adds a boatload of new features, and you can find a complete list of what’s new here. In this post, I just want to focus on one “small” part of that list: the Unicode enhancements.

Unicode Bible Searching: Just over a year ago, we added limited support for Unicode Bibles so that you could place Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian Bibles in parallel with other Accordance Bibles. Until now, you could search these Unicode Bibles by Verse, but not by Word. Accordance 9.6 adds the ability to search these Bibles by word.

Chinese Search

Note that you’ll need to update your Unicode Bibles in order to search them, which you can do by selecting Check for Content Updates from the Accordance menu.

Unicode Keyboard Entry: Accordance 9.6 now lets you use any Unicode keyboard to enter text into Accordance, provided that language is supported. Unicode Bibles support keyboards of their language, and Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, etc. are supported for in the search entry box of Search tabs and the Edit windows of User Notes and User Tools.

Unicode Bible Import: You can now import Unicode Bible texts as Accordance User Bibles, so if you’ve been waiting for us to support a particular language, you might try creating your own Bible of that language. To test this feature, I found a Latvian New Testament online, tweaked it slightly to get it into the format Accordance imports, and then imported it into Accordance in a matter of minutes.

LatvianUserBible

These Unicode enhancements are just a few of the improvements in 9.6. I’ll highlight some of the others in upcoming posts.