Font-sizes, typography and spacing

[Stuart Robertson]

First let me say that I am absolutely stunned with Accordance's ability to allow me to focus on the Bible and keep it central. The ability to create workspaces, customize text display for individual texts, panes including background colors, etc is simply superb. The speed of Accordance's searches is also marvellous, allowing me to "experiment" and get live feedback without fear of hanging the program (all too common with another Mac Bible program). There is very much in Accordance that I am enjoying.

 

After spending many evening hours over the last week with Accordance there are 3 little things that I wish could be improved (and which I think / hope can be improved without too much programming effort -- I've been a programmer myself for ~ 20 years now):

1. The "jumps" between the possible font sizes are too large. I run Accordance on a Macbook Pro 17" at 1920x1200 resolution and find that 24pt is just a little too small (especially at night when I'm tired) and 30pt is just a touch too large. I would dearly love to either have additional items added to the dropdown list, or, better yet, have the dropdown list be turned into a combo box with editable text-field at the top so I can enter the desired text size (e.g. 26pt, say).
   
2. The lack of ligatures is a small thing but something my eye constantly "notices". Text display on the Mac is usually beautiful and I have a few favourite fonts that display really well with common ligatures (e.g. ff, fi, fl, ffl, etc). This is a small thing but it would make text look better (to me, at least) if ligatures could be enabled for display.
   
3. Hiding superscripts results in irregular gaps in the text. Hiding superscripts seems to still draw them, only using the background color... resulting in gaps in the text that are unsightly and the "hidden" superscripts are still there, making selecting text fun -- sometimes I end up clicking on a hidden" superscript.
   

Perhaps I am the only OCD-type Accordance user who is bothered by these minutia. Anyhow, I am keen to hear others' thoughts as well as Accordance's thoughts on whether these issues might receive attention (even it as a very low priority background thread).

[Robb B]

I agree these would be nice enhancements.

[Gary Pauley]

I've had the same thoughts.

[Stuart Robertson]

The gaps__in the_ spacing are more___pronounced in_ the HCSBS___text_ as it often has__two superscripts after a single word. Is this something that can be improved? Comments from anyone in the know at Accordance?

[Joel Brown]

Stuart,

 

We'll look into adding more font choices in the future, thanks for pointing this out.

 

I don't know much about how ligatures are supported in the text. My gut reaction is that since they are a different character, it may mess up searching. For example, if I search for 'offering', that is a different set of characters than if the two fs were combined. Can you give an example of a font that supports the ff ligature? If it is a Unicode character, that would increase the difficulty even more, as we don't normally use unicode for our English texts.

 

The superscript spacing is definitely an issue we've been working through for a long time. The fundamental reason we still have a space there is so that the character/word alignment doesn't get messed up. However, we have some ideas to improve this for better visual display.

 

Thanks for your feedback.

[Stuart Robertson]

Ligatures are not drawn using special "ligature" characters. OS X (whether using Carbon or Cocoa's Text Drawing APIs) maintains the original (e.g. ff, fl, etc) characters in the text buffer but "draws" the appropriate ligature shapes (if the font being used defines them). To enable this all that is needed is to pass the appropriate flags to either ATSUI (assuming Carbon) or Text Drawing API (Cocoa). I gather from crash reports that Accordance is built using Carbon so the Carbon ATSUI Programmer's Guide (PDF) will help you. Search for "ligature" in the PDF or see page 146 if you're in a hurry.

 

So, no need for Unicode characters or anything special. Text selection will not change nor will the text that is held in programmatic buffers... only the way the text is displayed. In the same way kerning can be enabled which improves visual display a lot, making text more beautiful and "Mac like".