Why Accordance Shop Now Archives Forums
Customize Your Scripture Reading Experience
in Accordance for Mobile Devices
In this month’s newsletter, discover how to personalize the settings for your preferred reading experience in Accordance on mobile devices. Plus, we have a brand new Bible translation that you can download for FREE!.
People spend a lot of time searching for the right layout in print Bibles. Do you want a Bible with paragraphs or should it be verse by verse? Red letter or all black letter? Single or double column? Accordance Bible Software lets you fine tune these options, and a whole lot more, to create your ultimate Bible-reading experience. And Accordance on Android and iOS devices are perfect for reading, studying, and reflecting on the Bible in longer sittings.
First, you will want to go to Accordance settings on your device (iOS: Library icon: Settings icon; Android: Menu icon: Settings). There you will find the settings to adjust your Text Display. Most of these settings will be fairly straightforward. You can change font and font color, background, line spacing (the amount of space between lines of text), size of text and more. However, there are a few other settings that are often overlooked when setting up your device (note: the settings discussed below are under Advanced on iOS devices).
Hide superscripts: Most Bible versions have superscripted characters or numbers attached to words in a Bible verse for cross references or translation notes. In Accordance, you can simply tap on one of these references to see the content in the Instant Details window. But perhaps you want to read uninterrupted by these superscripted characters. Just flip the switch to turn them off.
Suppress Poetry: The Bible contains lots of poetry in both Old and New Testaments. Most modern printed works attempt to represent poetry in the Bible through idents and well-placed line breaks. However, many may be surprised to know that most biblical manuscripts don’t make these kinds of distinctions for poetic passages. The average Accordance user probably wants to leave poetic formatting as is, but if for some reason you don’t, simply turn it off.
Hide red letter: Red lettering, indicating the words of Christ, may be pretty, but it’s often hard on the eyes when reading in long sittings. And you may or may not know, but it’s actually a fairly recent (19th century) publishing innovation to include red lettering in Bibles. Moreover, even biblical scholars can’t always agree on all the words that should be in red and which ones should not. For instance, many Bible versions put John 3:16 in red letters, but some translations, including the NIV, do not. Think about it: were the words in John 3:16 spoken by Jesus, or are they the Gospel writer’s commentary on the words Jesus has spoken to Nicodemus? Since the scholars can’t agree on this issue, you may just want to turn red lettering off.
Going to the Text Display Settings in Accordance creates a default look for any Bible you open, whether it’s a translation or original language text. However, you can also adjust settings on a title-by- title basis by going to the Text Settings icon in the top right corner of the screen when reading the Bible.
Bonus: Page Turning and Columns in iOS. Unfortunately, these two features are not available in Accordance on Android devices yet, but they will be coming in a future update.
iPhones and iPads have two options for reading Bibles and other books: scrolling or page turning. Scrolling is usually the default in that you use your finger to swipe text vertically. However, if you want to create a virtual page to “turn,” you can enable this feature in the Text settings and swipe content horizontally, just like turning a page.
If you prefer to read a Bible in columns (often easier if you’re in a wider landscape mode), you can turn on this feature. To do this, while viewing any book or Bible in Accordance, go to the Text settings icon in the top right of your screen. There you will see the Page Turning switch for that particular title. Note that Page Turning must be enabled to view columns. Then tap on the arrow to the right of the Page Turning button. Here, you can enable columns and even determine how many columns you will see. Keep in mind that text may have to be reduced to a certain font size in order to view multiple columns at once.
We hope you will be able to set your Bible reading preferences in Accordance to your desired settings. Here is a quick video that demonstrates some of the features mentioned above.
