User Tool Import—Making it More Doable

[Joel Arnold]

I teach regularly from a 150 page document of mostly simple text, lots of Scripture references, an occasional chart and some tables. It also has footnotes, multiple levels of headings, and so on.

 

So in a dream world I would turn this document into a user note and be able to show the class the underlying passages on my iPad as we went along.  I always teach from my iPad for a variety of reasons.

 

Importing on a certain unnamed competitor honestly generates a really great looking document (straight from the Doc). It preserves my formatting, recognizes Scripture references, even grabs tables. Footnotes work just right. It would require very minimal work to have the document completely going for me—just insert the charts manually. Everything else is there. But this unnamed software doesn't support user modules on mobile. And it hasn't seen progress in that department for 3+ years. It's not going to happen.

 

Of course, Accordance handles user modules on iOS without a hitch. Really sharp. But... the importing of a complex document just isn't there. In fact, I don't see my getting the document into Accordance. It would be colossal. Headings don't come through; footnotes don't work. Honestly, little to none of the original formatting was preserved (though the outline did come out correctly in titles).

 

So I'm wondering if there might be some incremental improvement someday on the user tool import. Any other hints on how to do this well?

 

Thanks for the great work!

[Fabian]

For me the doc import is not a high priority, it would be cool if a simple select all and copy paste would import all from the doc(x) or other formatted files and the html would be improved first. 

[Blacs30]

I further noticed that German Umlaut like ä ö ü ß are not displayed correctly. The OS is showing all characters fine. I tried multiple different encodings but my assumption is that UTF8 should be good for the western world (probably UTF16 for Chinese and Japanese etc).

 

I haven't tried the HTML import yet because Calibre does not support conversion from PDF or EPUBs to HTML. But I could imagine that HTML preserves stuff like header and footnotes.

 

Little off topic:

I have written a script with apple script to import all TXT files within one folder using the "Import User Tool" function from Accordance.

The script is maybe not that beautiful but works quite well by now. It works only on a Mac.

 

It can be easily adjusted to import HTML or the TLG format as well.

 

I just didn't want to import all my files manually.

 

Calibre is the tool of choice for all my books but I wanted the text to be available in Accordance as well for parallel readings.

 

Here is a link to GitHub. Feel free to improve mistakes etc.

https://github.com/blacs30/Accordance-Scripts

 

If wished I can also post the script here but I thought it might be little bit too much.

[Joel Brown]

User Tool import does not support unicode, with the exception of Greek or Hebrew characters for conversion upon import.  You'll ideally need your tool to be in the MacRoman encoding (Windows ISO Latin if on Windows).

[Joel Arnold]

Just got off a great webinar with Mark Allison about user tools. Very well done. A few things that came up there that seemed to be limitations in the user tools feature set:

Not being able to link footnotes in a user tool is a pretty tough limitation, honestly. Tables also. Both would be awesome to see in the future. Those two things would allow me to fit Accordance Tools into my teaching workflow and teach / preach from a user tool on my iPad.

 

This is maybe a little nicheish, but I'd love to create my own reading schedule, so the ability to tag a date would be awesome. There's apparently some way to do it because I've seen them on Accordance Exchange.

[Fabian]

User Tool import does not support unicode, with the exception of Greek or Hebrew characters for conversion upon import.  You'll ideally need your tool to be in the MacRoman encoding (Windows ISO Latin if on Windows).

Joel

 

It planned to support unicode in User Tools?