Verse vs. Word highlighting

[Kerry Magruder]

David's recent blog posts on highlighting have been extremely welcome, as highlighting is an easily overlooked yet powerful feature in day-to-day use of Accordance. Thanks, David!

 

I made a comment on one of the posts about the difference between word and verse highlighting, and I want to continue the discussion here, if I may. Somehow long ago, I gained the impression that word highlights do not persist through module upgrades, but verse highlights do. This permanency would be, obviously, important to keep in mind when choosing whether to highlight a verse or a word.

 

David generously ran a test, upgrading a module, to see if word highlights were lost. They were not, so perhaps I was wrong - and it is very welcome news indeed that word highlights persist.

 

However, over time, I have noticed that my experience is more complicated than this. For example, I'm attaching a screenshot of some highlights I made a few years ago in Colossians, when I was using the NAS95S text. I've also posted the screenshot here:

http://kvmagruder.net/word-highlighting.jpg

 

At this time, I was using a highlight set designed for word highlighting, including "critical word," "repeated words," "hapax," etc., as well as some more general labels such as "research later," "compare versions," "cf. Dictionaries," etc.

 

Note, however, that over the last couple of years of updates of this module, that the highlights have shifted throughout the passage by a word or two, or at least by several letters. For example, "all things" should be highlighted in the same pinkish color in vs. 17, but as the screenshot shows, it has shifted.

 

So this level of drift, I guess, is to be expected, as the modules change. So maybe it's more accurate to characterize word highlighting as semi-permanent - persisting through updates but drifting, rather than remaining stable.

 

So... given the advantages of word highlighting, would anyone care to discuss possible strategies for mitigating and reducing drifting word highlights?

 

PEACE

Kerry

[David Lang]

Kerry, I didn't mention this in the comment, but the one thing that can potentially mess up word highlighting is a module update which has a major change in the position of words in a verse or paragraph. This is more likely to happen in a tool than in a text module.

 

From your screenshot, it looks like all the places where the highlights have shifted come after a superscript character. "Giving thanks" at the beginning of verse 12 comes before any superscript characters and is not shifted at all. Many of the other highlights that are shifted by a single character contain a single superscript character. This may be something that resulted from a major change in the module at some point. Perhaps NAS95S was updated at some point to include additional superscript characters and that caused the shift.

[Kerry Magruder]

David,

 

Thanks for the reply - you're right about the drift being related to the superscripts in my screenshot. As one possible means of mitigating the drift, I tried hiding superscripts - using the one shortcut that we must remember, Cmd-T. But it did not have any effect.

 

It appears that word highlighting generally is based on a character count from the beginning of each verse. It's great that it resets at each verse, so that the drift isn't compounded further through the chapter or paragraph. So that automatically mitigates the drift - it could be much worse.

 

But the fact that the drift still occurs makes me hesitant to use word highlighting as much as I did that summer when I was reading Colossians. But maybe my experience is very limited, and the NAS95S module is atypical.

 

In an ideal world, I wish there were some way to make the word highlights adjustable or editable in some automated way, but I can't think of how that could be predicted or programmed! But more realistically, it would be nice if a highlight could be clicked (or touched, in iOS) and then adjusted in position by sliding it one way or the other - kind of like how the cropping rectangle in cropping mode in Aperture slides around without changing in dimension. I would not mind going through a passage like Colossians (as shown in the screenshot) and manually nudging each highlight back into its proper position. That would not take much time, and would actually offer a rather pleasant opportunity to review. But now it seems I have no choice but to delete the highlights and start over (after taking a screenshot, perhaps, to remind me how the highlights were done in the first place).

 

PEACE

Kerry

[Steve King]

If only some of the highlights have moved can't you just 'clear' one word and then re-hightlight the correct one, then clear the next highlight and then re-highlight that word. You then will not have to take a screen shot and you can just do it as you go along (a bit like nudging them back into position but with an extra step)

Edited May 15, 2012 by Steve King