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What is the one book or series that you want Logos to release? What is the one feature that doesn’t yet exist but would take your research to the next level?

We want you to tell us the answer to those questions by sending an email to Suggest@logos.com. Don’t just limit yourself to one book or feature. If your mind is overflowing with golden nuggets of inspiration, we want to hear about it. We don’t just want you to feel involved in the creative process – you actually are instrumental in what we decide to release or produce.

The way we see it, technology should not only make Bible study better; it should make dialog with our customers better as well.  Suggest@logos.com is one way that this is being done.

Through Suggest@logos.com we keep track of everything you ask for and if it is possible and feasible, we look for a way to make it happen. We place all requests into one of three categories: process, functionality, and content.

• Process refers to how we do things like customer service, technical support, how information is displayed at our website and so on.
• Functionality has to do directly with how Libronix operates and what features and add-ins are included. 
• Content of course has to do with what resources (Bibles, books, journals, image archives) we offer. 

Logos processes, functionality and content today are the result of almost 16 years of suggestions from Logos users and those suggestions continue to shape how we do things. Here’s a closer look at each area.

What happens when you write to Suggest@logos.com?

Your message goes right to the inbox of the publisher relations assistant, who then forwards it to the appropriate department at Logos. Lately the assistant has received between 5 and 10 suggestions per day and, yes, she reads every one. Typo notifications go straight to Electronic Text Development; website recommendations are sent to marketing; and software functionality suggestions end up in development. If you are requesting the addition of a specific book into the Logos digital library, the publisher relations assistant adds that title to an ever-growing list. When we have an opportunity to speak with the publisher of that title we request your book along with all of the others that have been requested.

By what criteria is a suggestion judged?

When our customers make suggestions regarding Logos processes – we pay very close attention. These requests usually warrant the quickest responses in terms of the time it takes to implement a recommendation. Do you think our ‘on-hold music’ is too loud? Was there insufficient information on a product page at the Logos website? Don’t just grin and bear it, let us know and we’ll see what we can do.

As far as Libronix functionality, we don’t have an unlimited budget to do anything we want so we place a relative value on each suggestion.  We do this in terms of its ability to do the most good to the largest number of users and balance that with the cost.  A suggestion might be very expensive, but if a high percentage of our users would be happy about it, that weighs in very heavy.  If a suggestion is moderately expensive but would only cause a few to smile, that weighs in a bit less.

As mentioned above, the likelihood of whether or not we release suggested content depends mostly on the publisher’s stance toward electronic books. Many publishers have seen the proverbial light and are completely behind our efforts to digitize their content.  On the other hand, some think that venturing in this direction would negatively affect sales of print books and as such have decided to avoid electronic publishing altogether (until they absolutely have to release a title in electronic format).  Other publishers are willing to do no more than just dip their toe in and license a few books at a time.  But each year more and more publishers are catching on that the Libronix user base exists in its own parallel universe to the print world and that the electronic editions of their books will be used in a way that print cannot be.

So what does all that mean? It means that even if every Libronix user suggested a particular title we've been unable to license, there is very little Logos can do about it besides keep working to convince the publisher that it would be in their best interest to digitize their content.

That being said, you need to request your favorite books (a quick e-mail to suggest@logos.com is the most direct route) because if we don’t know about it, it may not show up on our book radar.

One great example of how a suggestion came to fruition is the Charles Simeon Horae Homileticae Commentary (21 Volumes).  The story of how that product was created can be found at the Logos blog. To sum up the story, it all started with a suggestion made via email from blogger Adrian Warnock. This product ended up being extremely popular, but we might never have released it were it not for Adrian’s recommendation.

Help us improve!

We want to know what you love about Logos and what you want changed. It seems odd, but we would actually prefer to hear the latter. Your suggestion might raise an issue that we’ve never considered before.

So when you’re using Logos Bible Software always keep an open mind for how the software, the Logos website or our book selection could be tweaked. You could also tell us which features should never change because they are exactly what you need. When the inspiration hits, make sure you let us know by sending an email to suggest@logos.com.

Guest blogger Mark Van Dyke (when does he get promoted to a regular?) writes about typo reporting in Logos Bible Software.

Dr. Daniel Wallace's lecture about preserving the Word of God was a good reminder about the importance of textual accuracy. Just like the ancient manuscripts that are studied in Middle Eastern monasteries, Logos book files have an occasional misspelled word. That's why Libronix has a nice little feature for reporting typographical errors and grammatical glitches. It only takes a moment but helps us out immensely!

You can report a typo by following these three simple steps.

Step One Highlight the error.

Step Two On the top task bar select Help | Report Typo.

Step Three Fill out the form with the typo correction and your email address. Then click "Submit".

Please note that if you are reporting an error with Logos' syntax database you might need to send an email to syntax@logos.com rather than using the internal 'Report Typo' dialog.

When you let us know that there is a misspelled word in one of our book files, that word is put on a list so the next time we update that book file we can fix the problem. This means that the typos aren't always fixed the next day after you tell us, but your message will definitely be read and acted upon.

As always, we love getting feedback. Even in the case where we need to change something about a book. That's because the textual accuracy of every book we create is of the utmost importance – whether it's the Bible itself or the Scripture Alphabet of Animals.

Thanks for helping!

Logos 3 launched nearly 14 months ago on May 1, 2006, and since then not a day has gone by without someone upgrading to version 3.

We've talked about various books and features of version 3 here on the blog, launched two road trips, and sent out some pretty postcards to those in our database who haven't upgraded. 

And yet more than a year later, some of you are still missing out on what Logos 3 has to offer.

It could be that we've said too much across too many venues and what's needed is just a simple list of the most compelling features of Logos 3.

So here is that list: The Top 20 New Features of Logos 3

The Top 20 list was compiled by our ministry relations team and is the product of countless conversations with customers about what really matters to them.

These are the features that get oohs and aahs when demonstrated to a live audience and that have the greatest impact on the user's Bible study. We've gone out of our way to explain the benefits of each new feature and what it means for your Bible study.

Each feature is also illustrated with a screenshot and includes a link to a tutorial video (if available). So check it out ...perhaps this is the prompt you've been waiting for to take your Bible study to new heights!

If you are teaching yourself Greek or Hebrew or simply trying to keep your skills sharp, you may want to check out these free vocabulary lists that can be downloaded and opened within Logos Bible Software 3:

Vocabulary Lists for Popular Grammars

We've built vocab lists built around 11 Greek grammars, 6 Hebrew grammars and 2 Aramaic grammars. Some of these grammars are available for Logos Bible Software; some aren't.

I was particularly excited to see a vocabulary list for Athenaze, the grammar I used when learning classical Greek at Hope College.

As you can see, the vocabulary words are given in the same order as they appear in the grammar, following the lessons or chapters and part-of-speech divisions. You can edit the glosses and words provided, delete an entry in the list (words you already know, perhaps?), and re-sort the entries.

Tip: To manually move a vocab word up or down the list, click and drag it. To delete a word, click it once and hit the Delete key.

Another cool thing is that you can print these vocab lists to make flash cards! So whether you're starting out on the adventure of learning a biblical language—or want to make sure your skills don't rust over the summer—take advantage of this freebie and give your studies a boost!

See also:

How-To: Make a Vocabulary Guide with Word Frequencies

How come I don't have the Vocabulary Lists feature? Vocabulary Lists are part of the Original Languages Addin, included in the following Logos 3 collections: Original Languages Library, Scholar's Library, Scholar's Library: Silver, and Scholar's Library: Gold. If you own the Original Languages Addin as part of an older collection but have not updated to Libronix DLS v3.0 or greater, you can get Vocabulary Lists for free: open Libronix DLS and click Tools | Libronix Update. If you own a collection like Bible Study Library or don't own a base collection, you can get the Original Languages Addin by upgrading to a Logos 3 collection that includes the addin or purchasing it individually.

As promised, I'm back for one final post on this whole "most important people in the Bible" topic. The first two posts in the series are here and here.

Today we'll take a quick look at a visualization of the top 50 women of the Bible, as determined by Logos information architect Sean Boisen's calculations. This data is also available at Many Eyes for anyone to manipulate and try out new information visualizations.

Here's the scatterplot; click the thumbnail for a full view.

This time, dot size is the final "importance" score using all the weights and factors calculated. The x-axis is the total number of mentions in the Bible. Bigger dot = more important; further right = more mentions.

One of the most interesting things we see here is the name Zeruiah with a pretty big dot and fifth place in terms of mentions. I don't know about you, but I don't recall ever hearing a Bible story about Zeruiah. My girls (ages 3 and 4 1/2) and I are on our second time through the cartoon Picture Bible and we haven't encountered any such person.

Who is this mystery woman?

With the help of the Biblical People Addin tool within Logos Bible Software 3, it's pretty easy to find out. I fired up the tool and typed "zeruiah" to generate the following graph.

Turns out Zeruiah was King David's sister. But if she's the fifth most-frequently mentioned woman in Scripture and is closely related to a major character within the biblical narrative why wouldn't I know anything about what she did or said?

The answer to this question is also provided by the Biblical People tool. I can hover over or click each of the Bible references to see every mention of Zeruiah in brief context. Or better yet, type Zeruiah's name into Bible Speed Search and get all the verses on one screen.

Looking through the results, we find that 24 of the 25 mentions of Zeruiah consist of the phrase, "Son(s) of Zeruiah." The exception is in 1 Samuel 17:25 where we read that David's sister Abigail (not to be confused with David's wife named Abigail) is a "sister of Zeruiah."

So it turns out that we don't know anything about Zeruiah except for her relation to other people. We don't know of a single thing she did or said. Commentators speculate that her sons are frequently identified by her name because of the link back to King David. Anyone who trailed an older sibling through high school or has a star athlete in the family could commiserate with Zeruiah—"Wait...aren't you Abigail's sister?" "You're Joab's mom, right?"

It may be that Zeruiah points up another opportunity for improving Sean's "importance" weighting factors. Can somebody who appears in Scripture by name only, with no speaking or acting role, be numbered among the most important? I'd ask Sean for comment but he's presenting a case study at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose so I'll just have to wait until he gets back.

In the meantime, I've got to quit playing around with Many Eyes and get back to work. :-)

I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again...Logos users are a very clever bunch. 

One user, John Minter, recently posted a "wouldn't it be nice if..." to the Logos newsgroups. Regarding Kurt Aland's Synopsis of the Four Gospels—a data set within the Parallel Passages and Harmonies tool—he wrote:

I like being able to generate with my desired translation. What would be nice is to generate a table for the given section as a handout...

Six minutes later he posted again to answer his own question:

OK Figured it out. Select a hebrew text like the BHS and all you get is the table. Woo hoo.

I'm not sure whether this little trick should be considered a hack or feature (no doubt my friends in development would take credit for it as the latter) but it does seem to work and strikes me as the kind of thing that could be useful so I'm sharing it with you.

Try It Yourself!

To try it out, open Logos 3 and click Tools | Bible Comparison | Parallel Passages and Harmonies. For Source, choose Synopsis of the Four Gospels (Aland) if you have it. If not, don't worry—it works with other data sets, too. For Bible version, choose BHS or ESV OT Rev. Int (the latter is in more packages).

Now when you drill down into a section of the synopsis, you'll get the report shown below on the left instead of the usual report, shown on the right (click the thumbnail for a full size image):

This references-only table can be printed, or pasted pretty well into a word processor. It's a handy little hack if you want to include just the parallel references in a handout or other document...

Thanks John!

If you've spent time around Logos Bible Software, you probably already know that Bibles such as the ESV, NKJV, and NASB* include cross-reference links right there in the text. They're indicated by the "little letters and numbers" sprinkled throughout most passages.

Just hover the mouse over an indicator and the cross-references pop up in what we call a "tool tip" window. Click the indicator (rather than hovering) and the tool tip will remain in place when you move your mouse away, allowing you to interact with the links inside the tool tip itself. This is a great way to see the cross-references—verses related to these verses—when reading through a passage.

But did you know that Logos also includes a more powerful tool specifically built for working with parallel passages, Gospel synopses/harmonies, and tables of quotations and allusions?

So you could spend thirty bucks to buy a printed "harmonized Gospel" which would give you a harmony in one version (NIV, for example)...or use the tool within Logos and view the harmony in any Bible version you own, in any language!

Parallel Passages & Harmonies

The Parallel Passages & Harmonies tool is included in all the Logos 3 base packages—with increasingly larger data sets available as you move up the product line. If you have a base package you should have at least four parallel passage data sets and maybe more!

To access the tool using Logos 3, click Tools | Bible Comparison | Parallel Passages and Harmonies. Click the Source button to choose a source—"Synopsis of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Jackson)," for example. Then select a Bible version in the Bible version chooser box to the right.

You will see a table of contents that looks like the image above; click a title to open the report to that section. Here's what it looks like when I clicked "The Calling of Disciples."

Mark, Luke and Matthew contain an account of this event so they all show up here in an easy-to-read columnar alignment...in the Bible version I chose.

Notice the comment in the right-most column, which is supplied by Jeffrey Jackson, the editor of this data. To learn more about the source of each data set, click the first item in the table of contents, which is a description. For this data set, the description explains the approach Jackson used to create this synopsis and the meaning of special formatting used, such as blue or bolded text.

To get back to the table of contents at any time, just click the title of the data set (in this case "Synopsis of Matthew, Mark, etc.").

Navigate to the next or previous section of the synopsis by clicking the down or up arrow (circled in red above). Clicking the hooked up-arrow moves you up one level—that is, it will load the entire chapter into the display.

The left and right arrows work just like the back and forward buttons in your web browser—jumping you back to the previous view or ahead (when applicable).

More is Better

The cool thing about having multiple, overlapping data sets is that each editor follows a slightly different approach when assembling something like a Gospel harmony. All told, Logos packages include no less than six "parallel passages" data sets for the Gospels:

• Synopsis of the Four Gospels (Aland)
• A Harmony of the Gospels (Robertson)
• A Harmony of the Synoptic Gospels (Burton, Goodspeed)
• Synopsis of Matthew, Mark, and Luke
• Eusebian Canons (Eusebius)
• Records of the Life of Jesus (Sharman)

A quick glance at the Burton & Goodspeed harmony description shows that any project like this entails certain editorial choices that others may make differently:

"Our study of the Synoptic Problem, extending now through many years, has led us to certain very definite conclusions respecting the relation of the Synoptic Gospels to one another, and their literary sources. The purpose of this book, however, is not to demonstrate this theory; nor is its construction determined by that theory. It aims rather, as largely as possible in independence of all theories, to set the text of the several gospels in such parallelism as will make the facts themselves tell their own story with the utmost possible fullness and clearness."

Because each data set is compiled by a different editor, each offers a unique perspective on the text. We offer as many as we can license, in hopes that your Bible study will be enriched!

* For the Logos editions of Bibles, we use the cross-reference data supplied by the publisher, which was generated by the publisher's translation/editorial team. For some versions (e.g., NIV, NRSV) this data was not supplied by the publisher and so is not present in the electronic edition.

This is the third post in a series of posts having to do with the Apostolic Fathers in Greek and English. (The first post is here, the second is here).

Today's video focuses on different reports and resources that the Apostolic Fathers resources complement through providing text on hover, on how references to Apostolic Fathers within lexicons can be exploited, and also how Apostolic Fathers information can be used in the Bible Word Study report.

• Video: Flash, 7.6 megs, 6:32, with sound.

Note: The video discusses two resources that do not ship with Apostolic Fathers but can be added to your digital library: NA27 (included in "language" base packages) and the BDAG lexicon.

Today's guest blogger is Sean Boisen, senior information architect at Logos.

Logos Bible Software is continually undertaking new projects to expand our tools for Bible study. Many of these involve wading through data, usually lots and lots of data.

For example, the Biblical People feature (described in this previous post) provides Bible references, family relationships, social roles, and other information for every person mentioned in the Bible, some 3000 different individuals in all.

I'm currently working to enrich this data set much further to include place names, other named entities (like ethnic groups and languages), and an even richer set of relationships: people who knew each other or collaborated together, places they lived or visited, their beliefs, and many other kinds of information.

But too many projects chasing too little time means you have to prioritize. This raises an interesting question: how to prioritize development for our people data so we spend the most effort on the names that will matter most to those studying the Bible?

Since I'm inherently a data-driven, quantitative type of guy, my practical answer is to:

• assign a numeric weight to each name
• start at the top and work my way down the list in order
• stop when when the available resources, enthusiasm, or both are exhausted

Since we've got the data that connects people to the passages that refer to them, a good starting place is simply to go through and count how many times each person is mentioned in the Scriptures. There's an important technical detail here: I really do mean references to people, not just names (as strings). To see why this matters, consider:

• the same person can be known by several different names (Peter, Simon, Simeon and Cephas are all names used in the New Testament for Jesus' disciple)
• the same name can be used for several different people, or even different kinds of things

As an example of this second point, it's not enough to find the string "Judah" in a verse: you want to know when it's Judah the person, as opposed to a cover term for Israel or the Southern Kingdom. For hard cases like Judah, the only way to know is to go through verse by verse by hand and decide. (This investment of effort is one thing that makes Logos' Biblical People data such a uniquely valuable resource.)

For many other cases, while the name is only used to refer to people, there are numerous individuals with the same name. Zechariah is the toughest case here: there are 30 distinct ones in our database. So just counting occurrences of the string "Zechariah" doesn't get it right: you need to know whether it's the prophet Zechariah (from the Old Testament book of the same name), the father of John the Baptist, or one of the 28 others (most of which are only mentioned once in the entire Bible). So some pretty detailed data is required to do a reasonable job with this computation.

There are many different ways you could count and compute weights on a per-person basis. Here's one (there are other reasonable possibilities too):

• Let frequency be a count of the number of verses that mention a given individual (only counting one for verses like Luke 22:31, "Simon, Simon, Satan has desired to sift you like wheat", which shouldn't really count as two observations of Simon's significance as a Biblical character).
• Let book dispersion be the number of books of the Bible that mention the individual. The intuition here is that, for two individuals with the same frequency, the one that's mentioned in more books is probably more important, broadly speaking.
• Let chapter dispersion similarly be the number of chapters in which a mention occurs. This helps distinguish people mentioned frequently but within a relatively shorter range of verses.
• Normalize these values by their maximums (frequency=1370, book mentions=31, chapter mentions=258) just to scale things more nicely
• Assign a weight to each of these three factors (I used 0.6 for frequency, 0.2 for book dispersion, and 0.2 for chapter dispersion: clearly this choice affects the outcome).
• Multiply each factor by its weight, and add the results to get a number between 1 and 0.

Here's a graph that shows this metric for the top 50 people, along with the individual factors. (The image is linked to a larger version where the names can be read.)

While the top names (Jesus, David, Moses, Jacob, Abraham) are no surprise, there are some interesting observations farther down.

First, the composite metric really does change the rankings: Levi is #15 by this method, but #52 if you only ranked by frequency. Likewise, King Saul would be #51 if you only ranked by book mentions, because he's mentioned in just a few books: but he's clearly one of the most important characters in those books, and so it seems fitting that incorporating frequency and chapter dispersion boosts him up to #10 in the composite metric rank.

Graphically, the places where the lines approach each other are the cases where the various factors are more equal, and places where they're farthest apart (Judah's a good example) where they're most skewed. Back to the previous point about counting genuine person name instances versus strings: only 99 of the approximately 780 occurrences of "Judah" actually refer to Jacob and Leah's son, so counting strings would be highly misleading here.

Since names, like many linguistic phenomena, typically follow a Zipfian Distribution (sometimes called a "long tail" or power law distribution), it's no surprise that the majority (1634 of the 2987) of these names occur exactly once in the Bible, and the 59 most frequent names account for about half of all the name mentions in the Bible. So clearly these top names deserve much more attention than the long tail. Important disclaimer: I'm not making any claims here about theological or historical importance. That's a subjective matter, and you'd get different answers depending on your perspective.

One advantage of making ideas explicit and quantifiable is that you can compare their predictions against your intuitions and see how they compare. Some other factors that might improve the estimate even further (and remember, this is just an estimate):

• Though we value the whole of Scripture, there's a sense in which certain sections are broader in their implications. For example, anyone mentioned in the first chapters of Genesis should probably get an extra measure of importance: these are the foundational stories of Hebrew and Christian history.
• We're only counting proper names here: other descriptions and pronouns would help refine these measurements even further (we don't have this data yet, however)
• External sources (like Bible dictionaries) are a rich and quantifiable source of judgments about importance: the more words or sentences used to describe an individual, the more important they're likely to be. By consulting several dictionaries, you can overcome the biases of an individual work or editorial slant. The key feature here is making the connection between the described individual (often in a numbered paragraph) and the Biblical character: we don't have that data yet, but it's in our plans for the future, and an approximation with a bit of programming ought to be possible at better than 90% accuracy.

Postscripts

• Some of this material was previously posted here at my Blogos weblog. Unfortunately, as of this writing, some problems with my service provider have made these posts unavailable.
• This post at OpenBible.info is a response to the original series, with some interesting thoughts about alternative ways to rank names.

Related Posts

Follow-up posts here at the Logos Blog using Many Eyes to further analyze and visualize the data:

• Top 50 People in the Bible
• Top 50 Women in the Bible

Update 5/25 -- Chris Anderson, author of the best-selling book The Long Tail and editor-in-chief at Wired magazine wrote about this post on his blog! Check it out: The Long Tail of Bible People (AKA Jesus is #1!)

"So you work for that Logos software company..."

With 130+ employees and 5 years in Bellingham, Logos has become a big enough fish in a relatively small pond that I now hear something like this pretty regularly when I meet someone new.

This past weekend, I was at a birthday party for my wife's good friend. My wife's friend's dad (let's call him Bill) heard I worked for Logos and jumped right into a discussion of translation philosophies, the benefit of studying the New Testament in Greek, and the rendering into English of a number of his favorite passages.

It was a fun conversation, but, man, was I ever pining for my Logos Bible Software.

At one point, the discussion turned to Luke 17 and the cleansing of the ten lepers. As you recall, ten were cleansed but only one—a Samaritan—returned to thank Jesus. Jesus tells the man, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”

Bill observed that the Greek word translated "made you well" in verse 19 is not the same word used for the lepers' cleansing earlier in the passage. In verse 19, the word is a form of σῴζω (rescue, save, heal) while in verses 14 and 17 καθαρίζω (make clean, purify, heal) is used. [My glosses here are from DBL Greek.]

Bill wanted to make a distinction here that the man's faith was instrumental in his salvation, not his healing.

I hadn't studied the passage in enough depth to have an opinion...but the cool thing is that Logos Bible Software makes it very easy to dig in and explore a question like this. A great place to begin is with the ESV English-Greek Reverse Interlinear of the New Testament.

A quick glance shows me that there are actually three different Greek words used in this passage to describe what happened to the lepers. In verse 15, Luke writes that the Samaritan sees that he is healed (ἰάομαι).

To give myself some visual markers, I grabbed the highlighter tool from the main Logos toolbar and applied a different color for each of the three words I was interested in studying (click the image above for a closer look).

From here it was mere child's play to execute the mechanics of word study and dig into these three words. I don't have an answer yet (and I'm holding off on looking at commentaries until I get a little further into the study) but if you are inspired to check it out for yourself here are a couple of pointers:

• To very quickly find out how the ESV translates each of these words across the New Testament, use either Speed Search or Englishman's Concordance (both available from the right-click menu).
• If you use Speed Search, you want to right-click a word and choose Selected Text | Lemma | Speed Search This Resource. (Use lemma instead of manuscript form because we want to find all instances of the word in the NT, not only instances that share the form of the word as it appears here in this passage.)
• Bible Word Study report gives you visualizations that make it easy to see translation frequencies at a glance. Because of the syntactically tagged resources in Logos 3, it also shows syntactical patterns. For example, your faith is the most common subject of clauses where σῴζω (rescue, save, heal) is the verb.

Enjoy!

Last Thursday's post explained how to view all the papyri from Comfort & Barrett's Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts that contain the verse or passage you're studying. We set up the Compare Parallel Bible Versions report to scroll synchronously with Exegetical Guide (or any Bible or other canonically-organized resource or report for that matter) to make it easy to consult the papyri as you study.

Today I want to briefly offer an alternative way to view the manuscripts related to your passage and that is the Passage in All Versions report.

Passage in All Versions does not visually highlight the differences between the manuscripts but it does retain formatting such as brackets and uncertainty dots. 

Here's how to set up the report to show the papyri:

• Click Tools | Bible Comparison | Passage in All Versions.
• In the report window, click the Properties button.
• Set language to Greek and check the boxes next to the Greek texts and manuscripts you want to appear in the report (or Check All and then clear the boxes next to the items you don't want).
• Click OK.

Now you can enter a passage, click the Go arrow and see eclectic texts, received texts, and manuscripts for that passage. You can also use the "chain link" icon to link this report with other reports or resources so they move synchronously.

Compare Parallel Bible Versions and Passage In All Versions...two options for viewing manuscripts alongside the GNT text.

Update 4-16-07—a bug in the Passage In All Versions report causes some versions that you've deselected to appear in the report. Libronix DLS 3.0d (available as a beta download) fixes this bug.

In the course of working on a review of Ugaritic Library and Logos 3, blogger and pastor Dr. Jim West recently asked me whether Comfort & Barrett's Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts could be made to appear in the Exegetical Guide report. Since that report provides exegetical helps for a given passage of Scripture, wouldn't it be neat if it would automatically discover and link to any papyri that overlap with your passage?

I agreed that this would be grand, but since it's not currently coded into the Exegetical Guide report I wanted to find a way to do something similar.

Rick Brannan reminded me that the Compare Parallel Bible Versions report is a great way to examine and compare manuscript evidence for a given portion of Scripture (as outlined in this article).

Note: If you don't own this addin, you can use the standard Parallel Bible Versions report (sans highlighting of textual differences) or buy it here.

Now if I could only find a way to get the Compare Parallel Bibles report to stay in synch with Exegetical Guide so that they would track together as I move from verse to verse.

Wonderful news: in Logos 3 this is possible. Just set the "chain link" icon in both reports to A.

Now the two reports track together. Whenever I move Exegetical Guide to a new passage of Scripture, the Compare Parallel Bibles report updates itself to show that passage.

Just one problem, though. How do I get the Compare Parallel Bibles report to show not one but all the papyri containing the verses I'm studying? As you may know, a given biblical verse or passage can appear in any number of manuscripts and fragments. For example, John 1:30 is attested in four different papyri: P5, P66, P75, and P106!

If you open My Library and locate Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts you'll see that this single volume contains all the papyri from Comfort & Barrett's book and is, in fact, laid out just like the print edition of that book. It even contains a list of manuscripts in canonical order, which is how I knew that John 1:30 appears in four different manuscripts.

Because this single resource contains all the manuscripts in one place you might think you could specify it in the Compare Parallel Bible Versions report and the report would automatically show you all the manuscripts containing your desired verse. But you'd be wrong...

When you tell the report to compare NA27 and TENTGM (the all-in-one resource), the report only shows the first papyrus that matches the verse selected...in this case John 1:30 from P5. This is because the report is designed to compare Bible versions that are individual resources within the digital library...not multiple "versions" within one book. If only we could split the manuscripts up into individual resources!

Fortunately for us, the Logos book designers anticipated this need and did just that. Each manuscript appears twice in your digital library—once in the all-in-one resource (TENTGM) and once in an individual resource (e.g., TENTP30 which appears in My Library as P30 from The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts).

So all we have to do is specify each papyrus (P number) individually, putting them all into the Versions box. The report is smart enough to show only manuscripts that contain data for the specified passage.

Since there are 69 different resources, it's a bit of a hassle to type in "P1, P4, P5, P6, etc." But I already endured the hassle, so I'll make it easy on you and share my workspace. Just right-click this file, choose Save Target As, and save it to My Documents\Libronix DLS\Workspaces then open it from within Libronix via File | Load Workspace.

Here's what you'll see, more or less (click the thumbnail for a larger view)...

Starting from the top left and moving clockwise: Exegetical Guide, Compare Parallel Bible Versions, NA27 Apparatus (Tischendorf apparatus on tab), SESB edition of NA27 with apparatus markers (ESV NT Reverse Interlinear on tab). Of course, if you don't own SESB or SESB for Logos Users Special Edition the apparatus and NA27 at the bottom of the workspace will show up as locked. But you can replace them with another book for your own workspace.

Now when you scroll or jump any of these four linked windows to a new verse, all the others will follow. As you can see, the Compare Parallel Bible Versions report is comparing NA27 against Scrivener's TR and all relevant papyri from Comfort & Barrett (in this case, P5, P66, P75 and P106).

Tip: You can either use this workspace "as is" or just add the Compare Parallel Bible Versions report to your Favorites and call it up whenever you want...saving you the trouble of entering all 69 papyri in the Versions box. Once the report is saved to your Favorites, you will be able to easily come back to it later or add it to another workspace.

Caveats and Links

Eli Evans saw what I was doing here and is giving some thought as to how to make this all work a little smoother in the next major version of Logos. He also offered these caveats which I will pass along to you:

Beware that most (all?) of the C&B stuff has chapter-level milestones in it, so you may get a few papyri poking in where they don't have any evidence. Try John 1:1, for example. Neither P5 nor P106 has verse 1, but they both have chapter 1, so they show up with 100% variance from the base. The report asks for "John 1:1" and the resource says, "The closest thing I have is John 1, but it doesn't have any content," to which the report replies, "Close enough, I guess." P5 starts at 1:23, and P106 at 1:29.

Furthermore, it's worth noting that where it looks like there is a significant variant, one really ought to click on the MSS title in the report and look at the resource. Things like brackets and uncertainty dots are stripped in the report, so there's a whole level of detail that isn't represented here. But this is good for finding the drill-down spots.

He's right on both counts, of course. Take a look at the screenshot below and you'll notice that brackets and dots have been stripped out for this report. Also, things like hard returns get flagged as differences (see, for example, blepei in P5 and P106). Since manuscripts may have words missing along the edges these hard returns can actually hold significance but it's always a good idea to open up the actual manuscript for further detail.

All that to say that uncritical use of this report would be unwise but with some discernment as to what it can and cannot do, it's a great way to quickly flag differences between the manuscripts and know where to dig in for further analysis.

Links

• Here's that workspace file one more time: right-click this file, choose Save Target As, and save it to My Documents\Libronix DLS\Workspaces.
• Comfort & Barrett's Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts in case you don't already own it.

In a previous post, we looked at how English translations delimit the quotation in James 4.5. Do other resources shed any light on this question?

Greek New Testaments

We can examine the formatting of Greek New Testaments much like we examined the formatting of English New Testaments. In Logos Bible Software, the relevant Greek NTs are the NA27 and UBS4 editions along with Westcott & Hort. If you have a product from Thomas Nelson, you may also have the Hodges/Farstad edition of the Majority Text, this is formatted as well.

In the above, you can see that Hodges/Farstad formats v. 6 as a quotation (complete with angle quotes). In v. 5, the relevant portion appears to be treated as a quotation of some sort; this is traditionally what an upper-cased letter after introduction would imply (ἡ Γραφὴ λέγει, Πρὸς φθόνον ἐπιποθεῖ). The upper-case gamma in Γραφὴ also implies the editors see this as referring to the Scriptures, and not to generic writings of some sort.

The NA27 uses italicised text for v. 6, which indicates an Old Testament quotation. But no special formatting or casing appears in v. 5. The UBS4 is similar, only they have no special formatting implying quotation or quotation source.

Westcott and Hort use bold text to indicate some sort of quotation or allusion (not always to the Old Testament). So v. 6 includes a quotation, but no special formatting on v. 5. (note also the placement of the question mark in WH vs. NA27/UBS, that could be significant when translating the verses).

Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament

The Lexham SGNT marks what the editor considers to be quotations from or allusions to external source with what is called a Quotative Frame.

The Lexham SGNT Glossary defines the Quotative Frame as follows:

Quotative Frame: A frame which contains an explicit quotation, or citation, from an external source. Where allusion occurs or where, as in sections of Hebrews, the text of external sources is woven inextricably into the main text, this is annotated as if it were original on the part of the author.
Lukaszewski, A. L. (2006; 2006). The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament Glossary. Logos Research Systems, Inc.

Commentaries

Logos Bible Software has a wide selection of Commentaries. Commentaries focused on working through the Greek text or that are focused on interpretational difficulties will assist one in this verse. I've reviewed a few commentaries on this verse (NIGTC, Hermeneia, ICC, Word Biblical Commentary) and they don't agree any more than the translators do. But the better commentaries will explore the possibilities and explain the positives and negatives of each in some degree of detail before arriving at a conclusion. Comparing these sorts of discussions across commentaries can be enlightening and helpful in sticky situations like this one.

Conclusion

Using resources like these — in ways you may not have thought of — helps in examining the questions we've run into in James 4.5. Hopefully this series of posts has been helpful.

My primary purpose has been to show that when one runs into ambiguities in the text, there are a lot of places one can turn. The options are knowable and explorable, utilizing both textual resources (Bibles and commentaries), databases (morphology and syntactic databases) and reports (like Passage in all Versions). So next time you run into an ambiguity ... have fun digging!

In a recent issue of Rick Warren's MinistryToolBox email, Rick wrote,

One of the most helpful habits you can develop as a preacher is to become a collector. I’ve been a “collector” for years, and it has made my preaching much more effective. I’m not talking about a hobby. I’m talking about constantly being on the lookout for items that can be helpful for your messages.

He went on to describe his system for collecting Bible verses, memorizing the Word, and keeping word lists related to a subject. Rick uses plastic buckets from Wal-Mart to file articles, illustrations, and other ideas he comes across that may be useful in his preaching someday.

As soon as I saw Rick Warren's article about being a collector, I dashed off an email to let him know about the new Sermon File Addin for Logos Bible Software that was just released today. I told Rick how, instead of accumulating piles of paper and having no way to efficiently search and organize his material, he could use Sermon File Addin to conveniently store it in one place—tagged, indexed, and ready to search!

That's right...Sermon File Addin takes the power of the Libronix Digital Library System (which represents, I don't know, several millions of dollars of research and development) and applies it to your own sermons and illustrations. Wanna know more? Check out the video demo...

 

I haven't heard back from Rick yet (does anyone have his direct line?)...so if you want to get an edge on Rick Warren you can add the Sermon File Addin to your digital library right now and benefit from the convenience of a fully digitized archive of sermons, illustrations and other ideas collected over time.

Sometimes you know parts but haven't put together the whole. That happened to me today.

I knew that I could link reports to the active Bible text window.

I knew that I could run a Compare Parallel Bible Versions report to highlight the differences between editions.

I didn't realize that I could link the active window to the report ... so when I scroll in my Bible, the comparison scrolls along. Now that is cool. Here's a video to show you how it works.

• Video: Flash, approx. 4 MB, 1:55, with sound.

Did you notice how I just typed version abbreviations, separated by commas, in the compare report window? Pretty cool, huh? And if you think that's cool ... poke around other reports and see which ones have a link icon. Link up, and see what happens!

I've been blogging about James 4.5-6. In the series I blogged about examining the text using English translations. Then I blogged about the underlying Greek. There are still more questions with James 4.5-6, however. In this post we'll consider the quotation from Scripture mentioned in James 4.5 and how it is represented in the English texts. Is it a quotation, or is it a summary of Scripture? Here's the text:

Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”?(Jas 4:5, ESV)

Instead of writing ad nauseum about this, I've recorded a video that that compares the quotes in English translations. Examining the way that the major English translations handle this gives us an idea of the options and might even give us help in deciding which option is preferred in this case.

• Video: Flash, approx. 2.8 MB, 3:22, sound.

Earlier I blogged on using multiple English translations to see how a passage is translated differently. In passages (such as James 4.5-6) where there are ambiguities, many times comparing English translations can help in understanding the best way to deal with the ambiguity.

With James 4.5, as we saw, translations are fairly evenly split in handling this passage. Recall the issues:

• Is it 'spirit' or 'Spirit'?
• Is [Ss]pirit the subject or direct object of its clause?

The first point is determined largely by context and how one reads the text. This means it is important to determine whether [Ss]pirit is the subject or direct object because this may assist in determining whether it is 'spirit' or 'Spirit'. This post digs into the second point above by digging down into the underlying Greek. Of course, this is problematic for the same reason: ambiguity.

As I put the finishing touches on the Ugaritic Library, I realized that this was an excellent opportunity to talk about the Logos Bible Software philosophy of data type tagging. After all, there are more than 83,000 Ugaritic data type references tagged so far as part of this project. (83,266 and counting!) Using the Ugaritic Library as a test case, I made a video showing how good data type tagging makes for powerful digital library software, and helps you get the most out of your books.

Check it out!

Flash Video - 11 MB

Note: The Ugaritic Library ships Friday - it's not too late to take advantage of the great pre-publication sale.

In the home group Bible study that I'm in, we're studying the epistle of James. We're currently in James 4. While preparing for this week's study, I noticed some interesting things going on in James 4:5-6. There are some ambiguities in James 4.5. This seemed like a good text to examine a bit further using some of the resources and reports found in Logos Bible Software (things that are in some collections, and some things that are supplemental).

First, the text of the ESV:

Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”(Jas 4:5-6, ESV)

Seems pretty straightforward, huh? It actually isn't. When reading the Greek in preparation for the study, I noticed a few things that are ambiguous. And these things are pretty noticeable when you compare English translations. So I made a video that shows how to do this.

• Video: Flash, 4.11 MB, 4:28, sound.

The basic issues discussed in the video, as a result of examining English translations, set the stage for the balance of posts in this series. At present I hope for two more posts plus a summary/conclusion post, though that may change (likely be extended) as I write further posts.

So what are the issues we'll look at?

• Is it 'spirit' or 'Spirit' in James 4.5? That is, is it the Holy Spirit, or is it more along the lines of Genesis 2.7, the life breathed within us?
• What is the subject of the quotation in verse 5? Is it:
  • God (also 'He')
  • Spirit (that is, the Holy Spirit)
  • spirit (that is, the human spirit, that of Ge 2.7)
• Where does the quotation in v. 5 come from? (I've not discussed this yet, but it will come up in later posts).

Further posts will focus on using syntactic annotations, morphology, critical commentaries and syntax searching to look at this verse further.

All in all, I hope to show that there are features and resources that those who aren't comfy with the original languages can use to think about these things and that there are other features and resources that those comfy with the original languages can use to examine these sorts of issues more fully.

A feature of Logos 3 that still draws the most oohs and aahs when I demo the software for people is also one of the simplest: Bible Speed Search. I think that's because of how quick it is (it finds as you type) and how easy it is to figure out. In fact, many people use it much like they use Google: type one or two words and voila! there's the thing you're looking for.

Type the word "heaven," for example, and Bible Speed Search instantly returns 701 hits in 661 verses in the English Standard Version Bible.

But just like Google's advanced search features, much more is possible using Bible Speed Search. This post will cover a few of the most commonly used search refinements. A more detailed tutorial is available in the training article Exploring Libronix Searching or in the Help file on advanced searching within the software.

You'll notice in the screenshot above that the first result is not heaven but heavens. What's going on here? Bible Speed Search automatically looks for variations of the word you type: plural, -ed, -ing, and so on. Usually, that's fine...but sometimes you really do want to find just the form of the word you typed. In other words, you want to turn off "stemming."

In this case, use the "nostem" modifier to turn off stemming and find only the form you typed. In Logos, term modifiers like "nostem" are used with parentheses surrounding the search term, like this: nostem(heaven).

Now we see that heaven singular is used 491 times in the ESV. But what if I want to isolate instances of Heaven, singular and capitalized? The "exact" modifier comes to the rescue and Bible Speed Search returns only 7 hits. Using exact tells Logos to only return exact matches, no fooling around.

As you can see, only twice—once in Genesis and once in Daniel—is the word heaven capitalized in the ESV when it's not at the beginning of a sentence. Significant? Perhaps not. But it would be interesting to know why translators gave those two instances alone the capital treatment.

What if I told you that Logos could very easily find every statement Jesus made about heaven? In a sense, it can.

When Logos data geeks (I mean, book designers) create an electronic edition of a book, they rarely throw anything away. In fact, they even save the red letters that indicate the words of Christ in many Bible versions. Cooler yet, they encode these red letters as invisible "fields" that can be specified in a search.

Field searches use a colon instead of parentheses to separate the two components of the search. The Words of Christ field is WordsOfChrist or WOC for short. So a speed search to find out what Jesus says about heaven looks like: woc:heaven. Pretty simple, huh?

(For a list of fields available within any given book, open the book and click Help | About This Resource. See the training article Exploring Logos Searching for more details.)

As I look through the search results showing all the verses where Jesus uses the word heaven, I notice that the phrase "kingdom of heaven" appears rather frequently. I'll go ahead and type kingdom of heaven in the search box.

OK, clearly this is not what I want. When I type more than one word in the search box, Logos looks for verses that contain all the words I typed. It's as if I said, "Find verses that contain kingdom and of and heaven...in any order."

This is called "natural language syntax" and mimics the behavior of the web search engines we use everyday. Again, much like a web search engine, if you want to search for a phrase use quotes.

Here's what a search for "kingdom of heaven" returns:

As it turns out, the phrase "kingdom of heaven" appears only in Matthew, appears 32 times, and appears twice in one verse: Matthew 5:19.

We've really only touched the tip of the iceberg. To find out more about advanced searching, including lists of available modifiers and operators, see the Advanced Searching section of the Libronix DLS help file.

A recent commenter here on the blog expressed frustration at having duplicate books that clutter up My Library and hog space on his hard drive. Jonathan Pratt wrote,

One problem is that every series that I install comes with its own set of reference materials - typically a few versions of the Bible and a single volume commentary or two, perhaps some other stuff. Well I have lots of copies of (say) the authorized version of the Bible. Because each has a slightly different name [e.g "Authorized version", or "Bible - AV"] they are all installed (copied to my hard drive) and show up all over the place in My Library.

Last time I checked the Libronix repository was nearly 6GB in size - I know because I tried to back it up but I can't fit it all on a single (single layer) DVD. I don't know for sure, but maybe I could if I could somehow choose to delete/expunge books that I know are duplicates. Libronix itself doesn't seem to be able to do that...

Let's address these in order. First, you can rest easy knowing that it's extremely unlikely that you have multiple copies of the same book.

Say you buy two products that both contain the KJV Bible. Fortunately, that doesn't mean two copies of the KJV book file will end up on your drive. During installation, Libronix DLS compares the files on your hard drive with what's on the disc you're installing. If a file on disc is newer, it will overwrite what's on your hard drive. If not, Libronix skips it and moves on.

A couple of caveats are worthy of mention, however, and one of them is to blame for making Jonathan think there are duplicate files all over his hard drive.

Eliminate Duplicate Titles in My Library

When you open My Library, you may notice that many books are listed multiple times.

Titles 2, 3, 4 and 6 in this screenshot are all the same book. Why this duplication? Many books include multiple titles to allow for different ways of finding the book (e.g., AV, authorized, king james, kjv, etc).

Admittedly, with all these duplicate and sometimes triplicate titles it can be hard to find what you are looking for...and confusing to know when items with similar titles really are different books. The Cambridge Paragraph Bible of the Authorized English Version really is a different version of the KJV...not the same file at all! 

To help reduce this confusion, we give you the option to display only the primary title of each book in My Library. Here's how to set your preference:

1. Go to Tools | Options | General
2. On the left side of the Options window, click the Interface tab.
3. Check the option "Use Only Primary Resource Titles in My Library" and click OK. 

Now go back to My Library and you will only see one title for each book.

Ahhh...much better. Truth is, this is one of the first preferences I set when I install Logos on a new machine. And there's really no downside...I can still type KJV in the find box and the King James Version will appear in the list.

Eliminate Duplicate Files from Your Hard Drive(s)

Most users copy all their Libronix book files to the default location on their hard drive and so never accumulate duplicate files. But the intrepid user among us may have set up multiple book caches, perhaps on more than one hard drive, and maybe even a network drive. As a result, this user—let's call him a "Power User"—may have built up some duplicate book files on his hard drives.

If you fall into this category and feel the need to identify and eliminate those pesky dupes, you'll want to install the free Power Tools Addin and use the Remove Duplicate Resources report therein.

After installing the addin, read through the help file just to make sure you understand how the tool works and what it's doing. The process is mostly automated and deleted book files end up in your Recycle Bin, so the damage can be undone at any rate.

Wrapping It Up

To wrap things up in a neat little bundle...Libronix is probably not junking up your hard drive with duplicate book files. But you can always run the Remove Duplicate Resources report just to be sure. And by telling My Library to show only primary book titles, you can eliminate any remaining feelings of clutter that may still disturb your tranquility.

If you shared some of Jonathan's questions and concerns at the beginning of this post, you should now sleep a little better tonight.

In a post awhile back, I mentioned something called the Active Bible Reference visual filter.

This is one of those things best seen. So I made a video to show how it works. Check it out.

• Video: Flash, 4:15, 4MB, with sound.

As you may already know, the Morris Proctor Tips & Tricks Blog offers two new tips every week for getting the most out of Logos Bible Software (learn more).

User David Bergquist posed the following question on a recent post at the Tips blog:

Is there a way to have one note show up in two places, for instance at a Bible verse and also in another book? I know one could make two copies of the same note, but is there a way to avoid making duplicate notes to have it show up in different books?

Here's my response, with the addition of a couple of illustrative screenshots:

David, you can create a system-wide note that's attached to a Bible verse. Then your note will show up in any book organized by Bible verse (e.g., Bibles and commentaries)!

To do this, right-click in a Bible or commentary and choose Add a Note | [desired note file] | Add a Note to [verse].

Voila! Now when you're reading any Bible version, commentary, or other book organized by verse (e.g., The New Manners and Customs of the Bible) you can just click the yellow note icon to open and edit the note. Or hover the mouse over the note icon to preview your note right where you are.

Guest bloggers Johnny Cisneros and Steve Runge pull back the curtain on a new addin coming soon from the Logos "skunk works."

Many of us know that we have the resources within Logos to do good exegesis. However, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the process. You may not know where to start or where to end a study. How can you make sure that you’ve made the most of the resources available to you within your digital library? A new feature will assist users, veteran and new alike, with just that.

The Study Tools addin will guide you through the process of Bible study from exegesis to application. This helpful addin ties together many of the powerful tools in Logos into one convenient template. Such a template provides an organized structure to guide you through each step of exegesis. It saves you time by creating links to a variety of Bible tools pertaining to each one of the steps. It conveniently provides you with the ability to make your own notes as you go. The template is especially useful for sermon preparation. Outlines can be prepared under the ‘Application’ section of the template.

Screenshot of a study document (beta version, subject to change)

The Study Tools addin offers something for everyone. Existing users will find a new way to utilize the powerful resources within Logos in their study and sermon preparation. New users will find a way to become familiar with the many resources available in Logos.

Update 2/13 - If you can't wait to try out the addin, you can download a beta version that unlocks the Study Tools addin for a limited time. Once you have it installed, create a new study document via the File | New menu. Please route your feedback on the addin to the beta newsgroup.

Yep, that post title is correct.

Lord willing, my wife Amy is due to deliver our first child in mid-May.** (Insert applause here, Amy really is fantastic!) As many first-time parents-to-be, we're reading a lot and researching the whole process. We've got books on all sorts of stuff, which is par for the course for this bibliophile Daddy-to-be.

One very helpful book has been The Christian Woman's Guide to Childbirth by Debra Evans and Ingrid Trobisch. It was published by Crossway Books (which is where the link goes) but it is unfortunately out of print, so you'll have to find a used copy somewhere. We found ours on Amazon for five bucks.

One of the things that Amy and I love about The Christian Woman's Guide to Childbirth is that it has a great Scripture reference index, and each chapter also lists a number of references having to do, in one way or another, with the basic content or thoughts in the chapter. Good stuff for focusing our minds on our Lord and Saviour and his gracious provision and comfort through the traumatic and uncertain (yet joyous!) time before us.

So to take those references into the hospital with us, we're starting to use the Verse List feature in Logos Bible Software. We're making a verse list for each topic, then we'll just print them out so we'll have ready-reference during labor and delivery.

How do you make a verse list, you ask?

• File | New
• Select Verse List from the New Document dialog
• Click Add button. Use the dialog or point to proper source.
• Voila! Use the Preferences button to give the file a name, but the system will prompt for that if you close the document without providing a name.

Printing is pretty easy too. Just open the verse list (either through File | Open or through the Open Document button on the toolbar), then export or print.

** We've decided to be surprised, so we don't know the sex of the baby and don't plan on finding out before the big day! At the time of this post, Mom thinks it's a boy and Dad thinks it's a girl. Either way, we're greatly blessed!

One feature I use frequently is right-click reference searching within a lexicon (specifically, within BDAG). I typically keylink into BDAG and note the sense under discussion, usually by a reference citation (which in my setup is highlighted by the Active Bible Reference visual filter, which maybe I'll blog about in the future). From there, I right-click on the reference and search the active resource for more instances of that reference.

In lexicons, this generates a list of all articles that contain a direct citation of that reference, which can come in handy when working through a reference. Since this is hard to convey in writing, I made a video.

Oh, yeah. This works for all reference citations, not just Bible references. So you can right-click on an Apostolic Fathers reference, do the same exact right-click functions, and find all the places that the Apostolic Fathers reference is cited as well.

Or a Josephus reference. Or a Philo reference. In any resource. At any time.

How cool is that?!

• Video: Flash, with sound, 1:59, 3.6 MB.

Developer David Mitchell examines screenshots
of Logos workspaces submitted by users.

Logos customers make lots of great suggestions. Suggestions for books to digitize, features to add or tweak, website enhancements, you name it.

Most suggestions come via email (suggest@logos.com) and a newsgroup devoted to user suggestions. But we also collect feedback when we're on the road, from published reviews, beta testers, and blog readers.

Not all suggestions receive a response and sometimes a suggestion is implemented months or years after it was first submitted. But we appreciate every one.

And sometimes we're able to implement them right away, as you can see from the comments on this post at the Morris Proctor Tips & Tricks blog. A user named David Brokaw suggested a small feature he'd like to see added to the Bibliography report. He explained,

I keep all my reference books open in the right side and save my work space as I am working on a long paper. What I need is the Bibliography option to have a "All Open Resources" option that will automaticly collect the info open at the time. Great idea???

I agreed that it was a great idea. Mr. Brokaw's suggestion was routed to our development team, and a few days later the feature was added to the Libronix DLS 3.0c release candidate.

Now you can create a bibliography report from the resources you have open. Sure it's a small feature, and we can't always implement good suggestions this quickly. But please know that we value your input...and keep those suggestions coming!

A recent post on Morris Proctor's Tips & Tricks Blog prompted the following comment from user Aaron Cantrell:

...What I would like to do is choose a book of the bible, or a section of a book (for example Gen 12-22), and have the program give me a complete list of all the words in that book, or section, and show me where they are found in that section. It would be extremely helpful if it could be limited to words that occur a specific number of times. For example, "Show me all the words that occur in Genesis 12-22, occuring 50 times or less." Then a list comes up which shows all these words and where they are found.

That would be a very helpful concordance feature.

In the print world, this kind of thing is often called a "vocabulary guide" or "lexical aid" and a number of excellent tools are available in this category.

What our users may not know is that all Logos Bible Software 3 "language" collections* include a feature that can create a frequency-sorted vocabulary list from lemmatized Bibles in Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, or Aramaic. What's great about doing this digitally rather than in print is that you can break down your lists by pericope, chapter, book, or however you like; you can add, subtract, or edit individual words; and you don't have to spend a dime on another book because the capability is built into Logos Bible Software!

Vocabulary Lists

Vocabulary lists are helpful when learning a biblical language, because you can start learning the most common words and work your way down to the least common. Or filter out the most common words you probably already know and focus on the less common words. Flash cards are great for drilling the language (through my thick skull, I could add).

The Vocabulary List feature in Logos 3 makes it easy to produce a list of words within a passage or biblical book—with word frequencies—and sort the list either by frequency or alphabetically. At that point, printing flash cards is just a few clicks away.

Due to the highly flexible nature of this tool, you could do all sorts of cool things... You could build vocabulary lists by author, combining, say, all Johannine material into one list. Or you could build a vocabulary list for a parallel passage in both the Septuagint and Greek NT. Go wild.

Vincent recently created a training article that walks you through the steps of creating a vocabulary list manually or by importing words from a passage. His article also includes links to free, pre-built vocabulary lists that go along with the most popular Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic grammars. Be sure to check it out.

DIY Vocab List

Here are the steps for making a vocabulary list for Genesis 12-22, as Mr. Cantrell requests.

1. Click the black triangle next to the New File icon on the toolbar and choose Vocabulary List.
2. In the Properties dialog that opens, select Hebrew for the language.
3. Click the Add button on the Vocabulary List toolbar and select Add Bible Passage...
4. Select the BHS Bible and enter Gen 12-22 for the reference. Click OK.

Voila! Like magic, you have a vocabulary list. (Think for a moment about what we just did and how little effort it took...and I think you'll see why I call it magic.)

We're close to the desired goal...now we just need to re-sort the list by frequency. Right-click on the section header and select Sort by Frequency (Descending).

Now the list is sorted by frequency and we can delete the words with a frequency over 50, if desired. Click once on the top row, then hold down Shift and click on the last row with a 50+ frequency, and hit the Delete key.

Everything highlighted in gray above gets cut and you're left with a list of words used 50 times or fewer in Genesis 12-22...with glosses included!

By the way, you can edit anything you see here, including the Hebrew words, frequencies (maybe you want to use that column for something idosyncratic like difficulty level, then sort by difficulty!), and glosses. And, as mentioned previously, you can print these words as flash cards and use them to master the vocabulary in this passage.

All this with just a few clicks, and available from the software you already own...no need to go out and buy a separate vocabulary guide!

* How come I don't have the Vocabulary Lists feature? Vocabulary Lists are part of the Original Languages Addin, included in the following Logos 3 collections: Original Languages Library, Scholar's Library, Scholar's Library: Silver, and Scholar's Library: Gold. If you own the Original Languages Addin as part of an older collection but have not updated to Libronix DLS v3.0 or greater, you can get Vocabulary Lists for free: open Libronix DLS and click Tools | Libronix Update. If you own a collection like Bible Study Library or don't own a base collection, you can get the Original Languages Addin by upgrading to a Logos 3 collection that includes the addin or purchasing it individually.

We've devoted a lot of words on this blog to persuading you to upgrade to Logos Bible Software 3. While it's true that many of the features we talk about most often (reverse interlinear Bibles, syntactically tagged Bibles) are only available with a paid upgrade it's also the case that we're giving away a ton of amazing functionality at no cost! That's right...

FREE STUFF

One of the cool, new features in Logos 3 that you can take advantage of right now, just by downloading the free update, is the SermonCentral.com search built into Passage Guide. This is just one free feature among many, but the one I want to highlight today.

Caveat: This feature is only free if you already own a product, such as any base collection (e.g., Bible Study Library), that comes with the Logos Bible Software homepage.

What is the SermonCentral.com search?

Logos has partnered with SermonCentral, a website that offers a massive database of sermons uploaded by users of the site. In Logos 3, when you enter a passage—say 2 Corinthians 9:1-5—and click "Go!" the Passage Guide report includes not only links to commentaries, dictionaries, maps, and reports...but it also shows you links to freely available sermons at SermonCentral!

These sermons were preached by people just like you—if you're a pastor—then uploaded to the SermonCentral database to share with others. They're great for inspiration, to get some ideas for organizing your material, gleaning illustrations, and to see how other preachers have treated the same material you're working through.

(We encourage responsible use of others' sermons, including citing sources where appropriate. For an excellent and practical discussion of these issues, see the article Plagiarism in the Pulpit from Preaching magazine.)

SermonCentral Results in Passage Guide

Let's take a closer look at one of the SermonCentral results that shows up in Passage Guide.

On the left you see the sermon title, the Scripture passage that it covers, a brief description of the sermon, and a rating that indicates how many people found the sermon to be helpful. 

On the right is the contributor, date the sermon was preached, intended audience type (e.g., Believer, Seeker, etc.), and intended audience age range. Obviously, most sermons are preached to the entire congregation so many results will show "General, Adults".

Blue text indicates links; clicking the sermon title opens SermonCentral to that sermon, clicking the Bible passage opens your preferred Bible to the beginning of that range, and clicking the contributor name opens a page at SermonCentral.com giving some information about the contributor such as denominational affiliation, church name, education, family, and other biographical details.

Click here to see the page that would open at SermonCentral.com if you clicked the link to the sermon displayed above.

So here you have a huge source of additional content, integrated right into your normal workflow within Logos Bible Software. Just a click and you're looking at instantly relevant material that you didn't pay a red cent to acquire!

Go Pro!

As with any useful, free service there's a way to get even more from SermonCentral.com by upgrading to a paid account. Upgrading to SermonCentral.com PRO provides a whole slew of additional features and benefits. They even offer a free 30-day trial to the PRO version so you can check it all out before committing the funds.

For details on updating Logos for free, and a comparison chart showing all you get with a SermonCentral PRO subscription, see our special SermonCentral page at Logos.com.

You're reading a post on the Logos Blog, which is updated (nearly) every weekday with news, how-to's, and other information pertinent to Logos Bible Software. Did you know that you can "subscribe" to this blog and receive an alert every time we add new content? It's super easy...just click one of the links below to get started or read our overview of blog technology.

• Subscribe to the Logos Blog using a news reader
  
• Subscribe to the Logos Blog by Email

After my recent post on Chinese Bibles, I would be remiss if I failed to let readers know how they could install the Libronix DLS interface in Chinese or another language.

Libronix DLS and Localized Interfaces walks you through the process of installing and switching between the available language interfaces. The interface is available in more than 25 languages and dialects.

Since we rely on volunteers to do the localization, some languages have partial support. For those languages, you'll see a mix of English and the target language within the Libronix interface.

As you can see from the graphic at left, the support for various languages ranges from 99.20% for Swedish (shout out to Thomas) down to 0.01% for Maori, with many languages left to do. As far as I know, nobody has attempted a Klingon interface, though there might be a couple people in the building who are capable.

Get Involved

We need help with the work of localizing the Libronix DLS interface. If you are a polyglot and could donate a few hours for interface translation, please get in touch with us. You don't need to know a lick of computer programming: you'll use a simple web form or Microsoft Excel to translate the English text in Column A into the blank space in Column B. Details here.

If you're looking for a complete digital library in another language, either for yourself or a missionary you know, see www.logos.com/world. If you'd like to add individual books in other languages to your existing Logos Bible Software library, you'll find them listed by language on our Product Categories page.

First, we acquired rights to the Conchillos Ugaritic databank. Then, we acquired the rights to produce several Ugaritic textbooks, grammars, and other helps as well. We put together a product.

Then we had to figure out how to support Ugaritic. [Cue scary music.]

Amazingly, the final release of IE 7 (released yesterday) introduced yet more changes that break Logos Bible Software.

The v3.0a update which we encouraged you to download yesterday does not work with the final release of IE 7. To fix this, we'll be making an "emergency release" of v3.0b available later today. This will fix the worst problems with IE 7, and a more thoroughly tested release will be available in the coming weeks (which will also have the latest Vista compatibility fixes).

We're very sorry for the inconvenience. Please check back here for the latest information.

Update 10/20: Latest Beta Fixes Compatibility with IE7

Today's guest blogger is John Fallahee, who works in our ministry relations department and produces free tutorial videos.

Your purchase of Logos Bible Software is essential for studying the Bible. You are saving countless hours in study time; you are going further in biblical research due to our easy two-step automation of “Enter Passage, Click Go”. You are adding more books to grow and customize your library and therefore have robust search results. However, at times, there is the need to narrow your search results to find very specific information.

Let's say you own Scholar's Library, have created a custom collection of books on theology, and include that collection in Passage Guide. When running Passage Guide on Ephesians 2:1, you get 22 hits within your collection of theologies. Alternatively, the reference browser returns 26, 22, or 12 hits depending on your search selections.

With the following “Power Search” example, we will reduce the number of hits even more in order to target very specific and relevant information.

The “Power Search” is like a laser targeting system, which can search through shelves of books, turn pages faster than any band-aid supplied librarian (paper cuts stain pages!), and can read faster than the best graduate of “Speed-Reader University”!

All you need for the “Power Search” are 3 things:

1. a key Bible verse
2. a key word
3. a key book

Open Libronix DLS, click Search | Basic Search and type the following:

bible=“eph 2:1” within 1 sentence sin

Next, select a theology collection that you previously created or downloaded (see below) from the “in” drop down box.

Then click the search button. Your hits are now reduced to just 2 relevant hits. You see, when your search specifies a collection of books plus a particular verse plus your keyword in close proximity—your hits are reduced. Note: The closer the proximity ("within 3 words" vs "within 1 sentence") the greater will be the reduction of the number of hits. Also, a Greek or Hebrew word as a keyword will also narrow your results significantly.

As an added bonus, since we searched our theology books, we can determine the theology of this passage with this method. If you click on the search results, and locate your position in the book, you will discover the category of theology for this passage. For example, Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology includes a discussion on original sin under the theological category of Anthropology (The Study of Man).

I made a video that walks you through each step so that you can add “Power Search” to Your Study Tool Belt.

Flash Video, 2:50, 2.8MB

By the way, to satisfy your hunger for more “Power Search” meals, simply add a book to your banquet...buffet style: Logos.com offers more than 100 books on theology and doctrine, many of which are not included in the base packages.

Collection Files to Download

Right-click the file that matches the product you own, choose "Save Target As..." and save the file to My Documents\Libronix DLS\Collections (create the folder if it doesn't exist).

• Scholar's Library – Theology Collection (8 Theology/Doctrinal Books)
  
• Scholar's Library: Silver – Theology Collection (10 Theology/Doctrinal Books)
  
• Scholar's Library: Gold – Theology Collection (11 Theology/Doctrinal Books)
  
• Mega Collection – (79 Theology/Doctrinal Books!)

Note: “locked books” can be searched but not viewed; add theological books to your library here.

I blogged about the new Favorites feature in Logos 3 here and here. Today I want to take a quick look at Workspaces—a feature that's been part of Logos Bible Software since at least 2001—and think about when to use a Workspace and when to use Favorites.

When working on research papers in grad school, I'd go to the library, locate and pull a bunch of books I thought would be helpful, then sort them into piles, sticking slips of paper in some to mark articles, leaving others open, but always arranging them according to a logic known only to me.

Similarly, the Workspace feature of Logos Bible Software allows you to set up any number of desktop configurations that reflect the way you work.

If you have a large monitor and like to keep four Bibles open across the bottom of the screen with four commentaries across the top…you can save that as a workspace.

Or if you want to create a custom workspace for each project you've got going, you can do that, too. Last year, Rick Brannan wrote about his personal workspace and showed a screenshot at Ricoblog. Workspaces maximize your efficiency and make the software work the way you work.

(For step-by-step instructions on how to set up a workspace, view the tutorial video.)

This leads us to the question...

When should I use Favorites and when should I use Workspaces?

If the layout of the windows and resources—their placement on the screen—is important to you...then save as a workspace. All your visible windows, tabs, even minimized windows in the background, are preserved.

Workspaces are ideal when you have a long and fairly focused project that you'll be working on over time, using many of the same resources and reports. They are also great for taking a "snapshot" of your Logos desktop at the end of the day so you can pick up at the same spot tomorrow.

In Logos 3, there are buttons right on the toolbar for loading and saving a workspace so this is very quick and easy.

The limiting factor with a workspace is that it's an all-or-nothing approach. You can't load just part of a workspace.

Favorites, on the other hand, are much more granular. They don't preserve the placement on the screen, but they are a great way to flag a specific location in a specific resource. Or to save a single search, as I showed in an earlier post.

The good news is that Workspaces and Favorites can work in tandem, to really supercharge your study. You can save a workspace that puts all your resources and reports just where you want them. Then use Favorites to load varying information into those "slots." So if New American Commentary is one window in your workspace and you have a saved Favorite for Matt. 7:28 in NAC, clicking that Favorite will jump the commentary to that spot while leaving your screen layout intact. (Note: This seems to work best with resources; launching a report from Favorites will open it in a new window).

So there you have it, some tips on when to use workspaces, when to use favorites, and how they can complement one another. I exhort you to go forth and experiment to get comfortable with both features and figure out how they can most effectively support you in the way you study.

Last week I answered the question "Can I save searches in Logos?" by taking a look at Favorites, one of the new features in Logos 3.

If you looked carefully at the screenshot I used to illustrate Favorites you may have noticed some interesting things in the "Crowds" folder. Take another look…

Notice that the Crowds folder contains not only searches, but also dictionary articles, notes, and even a Bible Word Study report.

Follow the Crowds

In college, I took part in a manuscript study of the book of Mark. We dug deep into the text using little more than a double-spaced printout of the gospel, lots of colored pencils, and hours of poring over the text and group discussion. (To read about the manuscript study method, check out the PDFs on StudentJourney.org, a cool new site from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship).

When reading through Mark's gospel this way, one thing you can't miss are the crowds. Everywhere you look, Jesus seems to be surrounded by a mob. At the time, we made a number of interesting observations concerning the ebb and flow of these crowds, and the Savior's interaction with them...and now I'm doing some research into the topic using Logos Bible Software.

Playing Favorites

The Favorites feature in Logos 3 enables me to save and organize each step of my research by placing Favorites in my "Crowds" folder. As my study progresses (or is interrupted and resumed later), I can refer back to this folder to pull up and review any component of my research.

Just about any resource, report, or document within Logos Bible Software can be saved as a Favorite. Resources are Bibles, books or journals; reports are things like Bible Word Study, Exegetical Guide, or Compare Parallel Bible Versions; documents include notes, sentence diagrams, lists (word/vocabulary/reference/verse), or even remote library searches.

So next time you're investigating a particular research topic or Bible passage, organize your work using Favorites folders.

Another great use of Favorites: flag stuff for later investigation. Instead of following a rabbit trail right now, make a Later folder and pop that juicy tidbit in there with a descriptive title so you can stay on track. Or when you see something that relates to a different project or research interest, pause only long enough to bookmark it to that folder. If you often find yourself wandering in your digital library, Favorites can help you stay focused.

Just think about all that Favorites can do to assist your study, and you'll want to start using them right now!

• Save time and frustration trying to recall later what you did
  
• Instantly get back to that key resource or note file
  
• Keep a commonly-used text or search at your fingertips
  
• Defer your bunny trails and keep focused on the task at hand

Next in series: Favorites vs. Workspaces

If you have other ways you're using Favorites, leave a comment here or drop me a line at daniel@logos.com...I'd love to hear about it and, who knows, it might make for an interesting follow-up blog post!

Morris Proctor says he gets the question a lot: "Does Logos let me save my searches?"

The answer to that is…"it depends."

Before you start throwing things, like accusations of being a weaselly marketer, let me explain. It depends on what question you're really asking:

Can I pull up a previous search to tweak it and try it again?

Yes, absolutely! (Lob me another softball, c'mon.) When you bring up a search dialog, it automatically displays the last search you ran. But maybe you want the search you ran last week. No problem, open the search dialog and click the button labelled "Previous" to see the last 50 searches you ran from that dialog. Select one and click "OK" to load it into the search dialog.

If you're working with graphical queries, you can use File | New, Save, Open to create and recall searches. For syntax searches, there are Load, Save and Previous buttons right in the search dialog.

What about the search results, can I save those?

Yes, but not as a search results window. Results of a Bible Search can be exported to a Verse List, where you can do cool manipulations like sort the verses, show them in a few different styles, or add more verses either manually or from a web page, file, clipboard, or Word document.

You can also use File | Export to save search results as HTML or plain text. Or just copy and paste the results into a document of your choosing. And of course you can also click the Graph Bible Search Results link in the results window and export the data to Excel.

Neato, but what I really want to do is save all my favorite searches, give them names, talk to them when I'm lonely, er, I mean organize them into groups, that kind of thing.

Great news! In Logos 3 you can do precisely that using the new "Favorites" feature. Here's how...

After running a search, with the Search Results window as the active window, just click Favorites | Add to Favorites. Sound familiar? It should…it works just like Favorites in your web browser.

You can give your search any name you choose. You can use Greek characters in the name. You can create an unlimited number of folders and subfolders to hold all your favorites.

When you want to launch one of your saved searches, just click Favorites and click your saved search. Then click the Continue Search button to run the search. The button looks like the Play button on your VCR remote.

Voila! Your search results are there, just like you remember them.

Next in series: Get Organized with Research Folders

In Logos Bible Software, context-sensitive help is available from dialogs or reports just by pressing the help button.

But sometimes you might just want to read the manual. And you can do that too, because the manual is a book in the system.

That's right. Just go to My Library. Type in "help manual". Hit enter or click on the title.

This is what is known as a non-scrolling book. It is a series of articles, each article is a separate "scrolling" region of text. Sort of like a series of web pages.

On books like this, it is handy to open up the Table of Contents Pane in the book window. Like below.

Just click the button, and the TOC Pane opens up. You can navigate the book this way. Or search it with the LDLS search engine. Set bookmarks so you can remember where you left off. It's your choice.

Another Hint: Try the Locator Pane by clicking the button next to the TOC Pane button.

While transliteration (the process of using the Roman alphabet – or another modern alphabet – to represent the sounds of a different language written in a non-Roman script) is useful as a pronunciation aid in Greek and Hebrew books, it plays an even more important role in many non-Hebrew Semitic language reference works. It is not uncommon, for example, to see entire books on Akkadian or Ugaritic that are entirely transliterated, with no characters in the original scripts.

We at Logos are increasing our support for many of these Semitic languages, and we needed to create a keyboard for easy entry of common transliteration marks. We’ve created a keyboard that can safely replace the English (US) keyboard provided by Microsoft in Windows XP and Windows 2000, since it duplicates that keyboard completely, but adds support for common transliteration marks on keys that would be intuitive to people who use the Logos keyboards for Greek and Hebrew. Those who don't use the English (US) keyboard as their default can, of course, install the Logos Transliteration Keyboard alongside their default keyboard, instead of replacing it. To download the Logos Transliteration Keyboard and its documentation, follow the new link on the Windows Keyboards for Ancient Languages page.

Daniel Foster just came to me and said, "Hey, I didn't know that the Andersen-Forbes Analyzed Text has two resource-specific visual filters!" I said, "Sure, I thought everybody knew that."

Well, if Daniel doesn't know ... okay, I guess almost nobody knows.

Visual What?

"Visual filter" may sound like something you do to a photograph to reduce red eye, but in fact it's a simple and flexible feature that the Libronix DLS can use to modify a book's formatting or content on the fly — that is, right when it's being displayed. A simple visual filter is the Page Numbers visual filter, which shows page numbers inline (for resources that have page number tagging).

An earlier post on the Bible Word Study Grammatical Relationships feature garnered the following comment. I inserted the referenced graphic as well.

When I do what you did, I get everything except the side by side translations of the passage as you show above (where you made the notes in red). For instance, I just show the cite Matt 13:14, but not the translations with the colored keys to the study word and the subject. What am I missing?

Yes, this isn't exactly obvious. Grammatical Relationships mirrors the preferences you have set for syntax search results. So try creating a basic syntax search — such as searching for all primary clauses with the word ἀγαπάω as the predicator (verb) in the OpenText.org database. You know, like we find in John 3.16. Here's a short video to show you how: Flash, 9:20, 11 megs, with sound. [NB: When I recorded the video, my computer was in the midst of a massive process that took some significant processor cycles. So it's a little slow in some areas.]

Then modify the search results. Note the "Current View" drop-down in the results menubar. This controls the columns. Also note the Bible button. This is where the English will come in. If your preferred Bible is the ESV, then toggling the button on should cause the ESV to display with proper highlighting in the search results window. Again, the video shows you how this works.

These preferences will then be mirrored in Grammatical Relationships.

When studying Greek words, it is sometimes fun and beneficial to see how the words are used outside of the New Testament. One of the features of Logos Bible Software, version 3 is the ability to look up Greek words in the online Perseus database, which includes a wide variety of classical Greek texts, many with morphological and lexical tags, and some with English translations.

Let’s say you wanted to see references to crucifixion outside the New Testament. In this screenshot, I’ve right-clicked on σταυρόω - the verb form of ‘to crucify’ - in my lexicon (in this case BDAG), chosen ‘Selected Text’ and ‘Perseus Greek Word Lookup’. I could also have right-clicked the word in a Greek Bible and chosen ‘Selected Text’ and the ‘(Lemma)’ form instead. Of course, I may also want to run this lookup on related words, such as σταυρός - ‘cross’.

Here Perseus has provided some analysis of the word. Note the link to ‘Configure display’. Use this link to choose between displaying texts in transliteration or Unicode or some other Greek encoding. After some initial analysis, you can see hit counts by genre – in this case 92 hits in prose and 1 hit in poetry. Clicking on 'Greek Word Search' will generate a concordance of the 93 hits of this word in the database, as seen below.

You can see hits in authors such as Josephus, Xenophon, Epictetus, Thucydides, and Appian. Clicking on the first line of each hit will open the Greek text to the larger context of the hit. Clicking on individual words will provide analysis to help you translate the passage. Sometimes a link to an English translation or Latin version is available as well.

In a recent article on Hebrew KeyLinking, I mentioned that using the arrow keys to scroll between lexicons isn’t always the best way to survey all the articles on the word you are studying, because the arrow key navigation is based on how a lexicon spells a word, not on the KeyLink look-up tables Logos Bible Software 3 supports for navigating from the Bible directly and accurately to the lexicons. I mentioned that you can more accurately get to all your lexicons using the Bible Word Study report or the Exegetical Guide, or you can use the right-click menu to select a specific lexicon as a KeyLink destination if you want to consult a resource other than your default lexicon.

I’m sticking with my story; it’s all true. But I over-looked a new feature in version 3. Sometimes I want to do a quick survey of my lexicons on a given word, but I don’t need all the other searches and features of the Bible Word Study report. Of course, I could manage my preferences and turn off most of the sections of the Bible Word Study report until I stream-lined it for the task at hand, but then I’d have to reset my preferences the next time I wanted to dig deeper. As it turns out, there is a fast way to execute all my KeyLinks on a given word while making use of the KeyLink look-up tables for increased accuracy: the KeyLink Summary report.

As an example, open one of the newer Hebrew Bibles (such as the Westminster 4.2 morphology or the Andersen-Forbes Analyzed Text) and go to Psalm 19:9. Let’s say we wanted to check out what our lexicons had to say about the word ‘pure’ (bar in Hebrew). We only care about the entries for bar that mean 'pure'; we don’t want to read about when it means ‘son’ or ‘grain’ or 'field' or a 'soothsayer' or a 'cargo ship'. Right click the word and choose ‘Selected Text’ and then select the Hebrew word with the term ‘(Lemma)’ after it. (‘Lemma’ indicates that you are working with the dictionary form of the word. Selecting this form also makes use of the KeyLink look-up tables, if they are present.) Now click on ‘KeyLink Summary’.

Your exact results will vary depending on what lexicons you own, the order of your KeyLink preferences and whether or not you’ve downloaded the new texts and lexicons that are part of version 3.0 or, even better, the beta version 3.0a. But you should see something like this:

In the screenshot, I’ve clicked the plus signs next to the top three articles in order to be able to read their articles right in the summary report. You can see that we’ve landed on the correct homograph on the expanded examples. (Some of the other lexicons don’t have look-up tables yet, so they still link on spelling alone. Most of the prestigious lexicons have completed look-up tables for version 3.0a, but other lexicons are still works in progress.) You can navigate directly to the lexicon articles themselves just by clicking on the title of the lexicon. That way you can follow any links in the lexicon, or read surrounding articles, or execute searches against the lexicon.

Clicking the word 'More' will expand the report to execute more KeyLinks further down your list of KeyLink preferences.

That's it: the KeyLink Summary is a simple, one-purpose tool for quickly surveying your lexicons.

One of the features of Libronix DLS that was completely redesigned for version 3.0 was the weights and measures calculator.

Click on the thumbnail to take a look at an example. This example was taken from Revelation 14:20, where we’re given an image of a horse-high river of blood running 1,600 stadia. Ick, right? But enquiring minds want to know, just how icky are we talking about here? So I click ‘Tools | Bible Data | Weights and Measures’ and enter ‘1,600 stadia’. I could have used ‘stade’, ‘stades’, ‘stadion’, ‘stadioi’ or ‘furlong’ if I wanted. A stade is an eighth of a mile, but the length of a mile in Roman times was different than today’s standard mile. One of the really cool features of the new calculator is that it doesn’t assume it knows which stade length you want, nor does it assume you know that there are two lengths to choose from. Instead, it displays both.

Note the second line of the results: 1.00 stades (Roman) = 0.92 furlongs (modern). (A furlong is another name for an eighth of a mile, the report just happens to call the modern measurement a furlong, though as you can see, it is savvy enough to show furlongs when you ask for stades.) So right away you are informed that the measurement for a stade will be different depending on which stade you are interested in (Roman or modern), even if you didn’t know there was a choice!

Beneath the conversion formula between the related measurements, the report is split into columns, one column for each measurement that 1,600 stadioi might be referring to. From here, it is easy to look up conversions to other measurements of length, such as kilometers or miles. Again, each list shows ‘miles (Roman)’ as distinct from the modern standard ‘mile’. 1,600 Roman Stadioi equals 200 Roman miles, but only 183.93 modern standard miles.

Take a look at the next example. Here I entered 1 shekel, but a shekel can be a measurement of weight or of money. And when it is money, it might be gold or silver. (The modern Israeli shekel is not listed here, though that would have been an interesting addition to this table.) Note how two different charts of two different colors make it easy to separate out the different kinds of shekels. Again, you didn’t need to know that there are three different things a shekel could refer to in order to see the conversion charts.

Trying to fathom (pun intended) modern equivalents to ancient measurements is always a bit difficult, and exact precision often eludes us. But with Logos Bible Software, getting to reasonable estimates just got easier than ever.

Logos Bible Software version 3 introduced new keyboards for Greek, Hebrew and Syriac that are designed for easy entry of the ancient languages on an English/Roman keyboard. We've also created identical duplicates of the Logos keyboards that can be installed as standard Windows keyboards for Windows 2000 and XP users. This means that you can use the same keyboards in Libronix DLS that you use in Microsoft Word or any other Unicode compliant application!

For more information and download instructions, click here.

The Graphical Query Editor Tutorial has been rewritten for version 3.0. Folks who have worked through the old tutorial will notice only a few significant differences, such as the use of the new Logos keyboards, and the regular expression section has been significantly revised because the syntax changed from version 2.0. There are some minor changes to the sections on field searching and reference searching. Happy searching.

Logos Bible Software version 3.0 sports a new feature called Vocabulary Lists that can be used to create flashcards to help you learn Greek, Hebrew or almost any other language. In addition, we've already made vocabulary lists for many popular Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic grammars so that you don't have to! To learn more about creating vocabulary lists or downloading the pre-made lists, check out the new web article. Cheers!

Logos Bible Software Version 3.0 introduced the use of homograph indicators for searching biblical texts in ancient languages. More information on homograph indicators and how to use them can be found in the new web article entitled, appropriately, Homograph Indicators.

One thing I use the Bible Speed Search feature for is to do quick searches of the New Testament for a Greek word, but display my hits in English.

Huh?

Yes, I type in a Greek lemma, but the results are provided in English with the proper English word highlighted. Rather than explain it all, I figured I'd put a quick video together to show you.

• Video: Flash, just over 1 minute, 1 meg, with audio

Note in the video that I use the F2 key to cycle between English, Hebrew and Greek keyboards (in that order) in order to type in English and Greek on the same line. I probably should've mentioned that, but it's too late now.

Remember, you can do this with right-clicks too. See this previous entry for more details (with a video).

It seems a good thing to have one place we can point to for a listing of all of the posts on the Bible Word Study report. So here it is.

If you've recently stumbled across the Logos Bible Software Blog, then you've likely missed some of these posts. Check 'em out!

• Bible Word Study Report Part I: Overview
• Bible Word Study Report Part II: Report Header
• Bible Word Study Report Part III: KeyLinks
• Bible Word Study Report Part IV: Grammatical Relationships (A)
• Bible Word Study Report Part IV: Grammatical Relationships (B)
• Bible Word Study Report Part V: Translation
• Bible Word Study Report Part VI: Lemma Reports
• Bible Word Study Report Part VII: Report Properties

This is the seventh and final portion of my series on the Bible Word Study (BWS) report. It's been a few weeks since I've blogged on this topic, but it is time to wrap up the thread.

Since we've only discussed how the Bible Word Study report deals with Greek text, we'll limit this discussion to the options for Greek words inside of the report.

The report properties are broken up in sections—the same sections that are included in the BWS report itself. So the Lemma properties have to do with the Lemma, etc. So we'll refer back to earlier posts as we step through each section's properties.

There are more than 100 new features in Logos Bible Software 3. One of the smallest is becoming a favorite of many users.

The Edit > Find Dialog has been replaced with a Find Bar. You can open it on a report or resource by selecting Edit > Find from the menus, or pressing Ctrl+F. This opens a small toolbar at the bottom of the window where you can immediately start typing. It then searches the text in that window as you type, putting a little starburst on the first occurrence.

The Find Next button (or Enter key) moves to the next occurrence. Find Previous (or Shift+Enter) moves back to the previous occurrence.

The Find feature is not a replacement for searching, but it’s very helpful when you know you’re in the right place, but want to quickly jump to a specific word or phrase. For example, you might open a very long article on Moses in the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary and want to find where in the article Moses’ sister Miriam is mentioned. The Find feature takes you right there, without launching a whole-book or whole-library search.

This is the sixth post in my on-going series on the Bible Word Study (BWS) report.

This post will look into the Lemma Report sections of the BWS report.

To refresh our collective memories, we're looking at 1Th 2.16. Here it is in the reverse interlinear, with the phrase in question marked up using new Visual Markup features.

The Lemma Report sections have to do with understanding how the study word (ἀναπληρόω) is used both inside of the Greek New Testament and in other Greek literature, like the LXX (Greek Old Testament) and the Works of Philo.

One feature request that we've had a lot in the past 10 years or so runs something like this:

So, I have this Greek word. I want to know all the ways it is translated in the New Testament. How do I do that?

Another similar question is frequently asked as well:

What are the different Greek words that get translated as this English word in the New Testament?

We couldn't always answer these questions before. In some ways, we could use Strong's numbers as a bridge, but it wasn't one-click easy to search the text to answer these sorts of questions.

With Reverse Interlinears, answering these questions is quick, easy, and elegant.

You're using Logos 3 and hadn't realized this yet? That's OK, there is a lot of new stuff in Logos 3.

I figured I'd make a video to run you through how to use Reverse Interlinears to start to answer these questions as you study the Bible.

• Video: Flash, 7.6 megs, with audio
  (press F11 to view full screen at smaller resolutions)

For those of you who haven't upgraded and added Reverse Interlinears yet ... you can do that on our upgrade page.

This is the fifth post in my on-going series on the Bible Word Study (BWS) report.

This post will look into the Translation section of the BWS report.

To refresh our collective memories, we're looking at 1Th 2.16. Here it is in the reverse interlinear, with the phrase in question marked up using new Visual Markup features.

A new feature in Logos Bible Software 3 lets you read Logos-related blog posts right inside Libronix DLS!

Of course, this feature is only as cool as the content that is delivered...and we're delivering some pretty cool content, indeed.

Every day of the week (except Sunday), you will see at least one new blog post at the bottom of your Logos Bible Software homepage. Posts are pulled from either the Logos Bible Software Blog (you're reading that right now) or from a brand new blog that offers tips and tricks for getting the most out of your Logos software!

Morris Proctor's Tips & Tricks Blog

Every Wednesday and Saturday, that new blog, called Morris Proctor's Tips & Tricks, provides a new tip for maximizing your efficiency and skill in using Logos Bible Software 3.

Morris Proctor, authorized trainer for Logos Bible Software, writes all the posts for the Tips & Tricks blog. Morris runs the informative, top-notch Camp Logos seminars all around the country but found time in his schedule to author these free tips which will help you get the most out of your investment in Logos Bible Software.

If you enjoy the biweekly Tips, be sure to check out the calendar of upcoming Camp Logos training events and register to attend the one nearest you! I attended Camp Logos a few months after starting at Logos in 2002 and it was time well spent—I give it the highest possible recommendation.

How to Read Blogs in Logos Bible Software

To read the latest posts from the Tips & Tricks Blog and Logos Blog, just open Logos Bible Software 3 (What, you haven't already upgraded?) and scroll down the homepage until you see the "Blogs" section header. Below that you will see previews of the three most recent posts from the Logos Blog and three from the Tips & Tricks blog.

If this section is not already expanded, click on the word "Blogs" or the triangle to expand it.

If you don't see the Blogs section header at all, scroll back up to the top of the Logos Bible Software homepage, click Customize View (located just below the date), then scroll down and make sure all the checkboxes under Blogs are checked. Save Changes and you should now see the Blogs section on the homepage.

Be sure to scroll down the homepage every time you fire up the software, to read the latest tips and news from and about Logos Bible Software! And be sure to thank Morris when you see him at a Camp Logos.

This is the second part of the fourth post in my on-going series on the Bible Word Study report.

This post will look a little further into the Grammatical Relationships section. Our previous foray into the Grammatical Relationships section is here.

To refresh our collective memories, we're looking at 1Th 2.16. Here it is in the reverse interlinear, with the phrase in question marked up using new Visual Markup features.

We left off the last post by saying:

So ἀναπληρόω means something like "make complete" or "fulfill" or "replace". We begin to understand the nuance of each of those senses by considering who or what is doing ἀναπληρόω, and to whom or to what ἀναπληρόω is being done. Grammatical Relationships does all of the heavy lifting for you in searching out these usages, categorizing them, and returning them to us grouped by usage context.

So let's examine the results and see what we can learn about the word ἀναπληρόω.

(See also: RevInt I: Reverse Interlinears as Books and RevInt II: Reverse Interlinear Lines and RevInt III: Reverse Interlinear Symbols)

Occasionally, when I assemble a piece of furniture — say for instance a “Jerker” desk from Ikea, like the one that I sit at — I am left with a few odds and ends lying on the floor. Then I scratch my head and wonder, “Do I really need that lock washer?” The real question, of course, is: Do I really want to take the whole thing apart again to figure out where it goes?

Occasionally, when you are reading along in a reverse interlinear, you will encounter some of the nuts and bolts that are left over in the process of assembling the alignment. Here and there will be a round dot (bullet point) in either the original language line or the translation line of a reverse interlinear, indicating that no reasonable equivalent for that word could be found in the other text.

For the most part, our editorial philosophy for making these reverse interlinear alignments has been optimistic. That is, we assume that if the translation committee thinks they’ve translated the original language words of a particular verse, then we assume that they are. The goal, then, is to account for the translation, not to demonstrate elementary principles of Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic grammar. As a result, we give the benefit of the doubt in making links between the words of the original text and the translation. Our editors try — sometimes quite creatively — to account for all of the words in the translation. All of which tends, we hope, to minimize the presence of bullets in the text.

But they do happen, for various reasons.

Does this mean the translation is “bad” where you see bullets? Not necessarily.

(See also: RevInt I: Reverse Interlinears as Books and RevInt II: Reverse Interlinear Lines)

There are quite a lot of symbols that you need to master in order to read a reverse interlinear alignment. Each of the symbols is has a popup definition in the Libronix resource, so you won’t have to memorize what they mean, but understanding them in the first place will help you with reverse interlinear fluency.

Nearly all of these symbols are in the original language line; it was decided early on in the reverse interlinear design process that we would try to keep the translation text as uncluttered as possible. After all, it is the top line.

So, let's take a look at those symbols, shall we?

We've talked about how to start up the report with a Greek word from the ESV English-Greek Reverse Interlinear, and we've talked about the report header. Today we talk about the KeyLink section of the Bible Word Study report.

To refresh our collective memories, we're looking at 1Th 2.16. So here it is in the reverse interlinear, with the phrase in question marked up using new Visual Markup features.

So let's look at KeyLinks.

(See also: RevInt I: Reverse Interlinear Resources)

You can profitably use a reverse interlinear by just reading it. I’ll look into some of the ways that Reverse Interlinears can be used in later posts, but first let’s just look at all the lines of information that are available in the two ESV reverse interlinears.

A few days back, I blogged about the Bible Word Study report. There I talked about how to run the Bible Word Study report on the underlying Greek word from an English text. In that post, we started the process of running a Bible Word Study on the word translated "to fill up the measure of" in the ESV, ἀναπληρόω. For a refresher, here's the text of 1Th 2.16 in the ESV English-Greek Reverse Interlinear New Testament:

The next posts in this series will walk through each of the major sections of the Bible Word Study report. Today we start with the Report header section. I know I said last time that we'd dig into KeyLinks, but there's so much happening in just the report header that it merits its own discussion.

This is more than just an attractive header, it conveys a lot of information and leads to more information that you might not necessarily think to examine. Check out the image below to see the different parts of the header.

(Yes, we'll get into the Properties and the other icons on the toolbar in later posts)

In the above image you can see five primary pieces that form the header. Some of this content is static, other content is dynamic. Portions of the header include:

• Lexical Form
• Pronunciation (optional, not installed on the machine I'm using for this post)
• Gloss from Preferred KeyLink
• Horizontal Ellipsis (...) indicating further glosses are available
• Gloss Source
• Lemma Density Chart, also known as a sparkline

I'll discuss each of these in turn.

Some of my favorite new Logos Bible Software 3 (LBS3) resources are the new reverse interlinear Bibles (after Hebrew Syntax, of course) — and not just because I worked on them.

A reverse interlinear in LBS3 is many things: It’s a Bible version that shows the original language words behind the translation; it’s a Bible with stronger-than-Strong’s tagging; but most importantly, it’s a bridge from here to there, from a translation back to the original language text that lies beneath. Furthermore, it’s a bridge that anyone can cross.

I'm in a home Bible study group that is studying First Thessalonians. So I was reading it the other morning, working through the second half of chapter 2. I stumbled across the following. Note the italicised phrase:

¹⁴ For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, ¹⁵ who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind ¹⁶ by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But God’s wrath has come upon them at last! (1Th 2.14-16, ESV)

The phrase "so as to always fill up the measure of their sins" didn't make much sense to me. I can figure out what it might mean based on contextual clues in the ESV, but it still seems weird. So I thought I'd use Logos Bible Software 3 and the The ESV English-Greek Reverse Interlinear New Testament to get from the English to the Greek, and then the Bible Word Study report to understand more about the contexts in which the underlying Greek appears in the New Testament. This series of posts will hopefully help in illustrating some of these features.

First we'll look into how to run the Bible Word Study report from the Greek if our starting point is an English text.

The ink-on-pressed-tree-pulp-wrapped-in-calfskin one, that is. Nowadays, I take my laptop with Logos Bible Software 3 instead. Sure, I raise a few eyebrows, but most everyone at church knows I work for Logos, and so they know (I hope) that I'm not surfing the internet or playing a first-person shooter game during the sermon. I do have to remember to turn the mute button on, though. The Libronix startup sound is nice enough, but not during the opening prayer.

I don't know about you, but I just can't turn my dead-tree version fast enough to find Scripture citations when they come fast and furious from the pulpit. If the sermon jumps around a lot, I'm lost pretty quickly. I find myself singing the Bible books song to myself to remember where the books are. Even then it's tough, because I usually work on original language versions of the Old Testament, so I get messed up by the differences between the "English" and the Hebrew ordering of the Tanakh. (Ruth isn't after Judges, it's after Proverbs, which is closer to the end than it is to the middle. And the last book isn't Malachi, it's 1 and 2 Chronicles, which are after Ezra and Nehemiah ... well, you get the picture.)

But with Logos on my lap, I can keep up pretty well. I can better than just keep up, in fact.

Users on the always-active Logos newsgroups often amaze me with their ingenuity. They come up with some very inventive uses of Logos Bible Software, not to mention creating scripts and custom toolbars to tweak the application in various ways.

I was recently impressed by a very simple but useful idea that had never occurred to me: a newsgroup user* created a collection of books that he owns in print but doesn't yet own electronically. When he wants to locate a phrase or word in one of those print books, he simply searches the collection of locked books to get the page number or section title. After that, it's a matter of walking to the shelf, pulling down the print book, and opening it to the right place.

That's right...Libronix DLS can provide a full-text, searchable index to some of your print books, too!

This works because 1) we let you search inside locked books and 2) we have some 5,000+ books to search. I'm sure you can think of how you might find it useful to search print books, but let's look at an example.

Just the other day, you were reading along in one of your print books (if you're like me, you can't recall now which one) and happened across a great illustration of the satisfaction found in Christ. You remember that it was a quotation from Malcolm Muggeridge but that's about it.

Libronix DLS makes it a 10-second task to run a search for "muggeridge" in the "My Print Books" collection you created, which points you to the R. Kent Hughes Preaching the Word commentary on Ephesians. Specifically, Hughes' commentary on Ephesians 1:13.

A moment later, you have the print book in hand and are reading this quotation from Muggeridge:

I may, I suppose, regard myself, or pass for being, a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets — that’s fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland Revenue — that’s success. Furnished with money and a little fame even the elderly, if they care to, may partake of trendy diversions — that’s pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time — that’s fulfillment. Yet I say to you, and I beg you to believe me, multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing — less than nothing — a positive impediment — measured against one draught of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty — irrespective of who or what they are. What, I ask myself, does life hold, what is there in the works of time, in the past, now and to come, which could possibly be put in the balance against the refreshment of drinking that water?

Searching the full text of your print books is a great way to re-locate that half-forgotton passage or track down a place name or topic that might not appear in the printed book's index. It's not a substitute for owning the electronic edition, but it's a nice added perk of the digital library system.

As a caveat, I should point out that not all locked books return equally useful search results. Depending on the structure of the book, the search results window may return chapter titles or section titles. This is especially true of older books that were not coded with page numbers.

If you're convinced of the utility of this, you might be asking "How do I begin?"

It's pretty simple, really. Just create a new collection (Tools | Define Collection) and when you do, uncheck the "Unlocked Resources Only" box. The titles accompanied by a yellow "padlock" icon are locked. Then it's just a matter of adding the titles to your collection that you own in print. Of course, you can include both locked and unlocked titles.

To search your new collection, just click the Search button in the toolbar and select your collection.

* I would give credit to the newsgroup user who suggested this, but I can't seem to recall who it was (par for the course) and couldn't immediately locate the thread on the newsgroup.

It's cool to see features and datasets combine in ways that weren't originally anticipated.

Just the other day, Eli and I were talking with Dale Pritchett (VP Marketing and Bob's father!) and Dale wondered about how to highlight an English text based on Greek or Hebrew morphology. Sort of like this:

Eli and I looked at each other quizzically. Then at about the same time we had the answer: Reverse Interlinear! And the cool part is that the feature already works in Logos Bible Software 3! It is a consequence of having data and functionality already in place, we just hadn't quite stopped to realize the extent of the functionality. But it is a consequence of:

• Having Reverse Interlinears available that align the original language texts (Greek and Hebrew) with a modern language translation at the word level.
• Having morphological information in the original language texts underlying the English translation of the Reverse Interlinear.
• Having a Visual Filter (a method of overlaying highlighting based on specified criteria) for morphologies.

Because of the architecture of Logos Bible Software ... well, it just works. Nothing extra needed.

Here's a short video (Flash, approx. 0.7 MB, no sound) that walks through how to specify the visual filter for the reverse interlinear. It walks through setting up a visual filter that highlights where finite verbs (i.e., verbs in the indicative, imperative, subjunctive or optative moods) occur in the Aorist tense. These will be visually highlighted with the "Box" style, so you can simply see them as you scroll through the text. And you'll see how the ESV handles translating them. After the visual filter is set, I then show how interlinear lines are customizable. In the end, you see only the English text of the ESV, but the English words that represent the aorist verbs are highlighted ... and no Greek is in sight.

Video: Flash, approx. 0.7 MB, no sound

Pretty cool. Give it a try if you're running the Release Candidate!

I'm excited about a lot of the features in the upcoming Logos Bible Software 3. One of them that hasn't received much air time is the Remote Library Search.

Huh?

That's right. Remote Library Search.

Let's face it, there are a decent amount of folks out there that are book geeks, just like me. We're the type of people who:

• Actually read footnote references.
• Hate books that use endnotes instead of footnotes because you have to constantly refer to the back of the book.
• Actually look up citations in footnotes and endnotes.
• Feel like you need to obtain cited books if they sound interesting or appropriate based on the footnote.

Remote Library Search is for you.

Yesterday on Blogos, Sean Boisen wrote about the difficulty he had finding the verse containing the phrase "you will know them by their words". He was looking for Matthew 7:16 and 20, and tried using "know" and "words" as search terms in Bible software.

Of course the verse says fruits, not words, and in some versions it says recognize, not know.

This is exactly what we created the Fuzzy Search for: finding things that you don’t remember exactly, or remember from a different translation.

Fuzzy Search was a feature in Logos Bible Software v1.0, back in December, 1991. It got lost along the way, disappearing from updates to the LLS and Libronix DLS, but was restored as part of the Power Tools Addin a few years ago. It lives on the Tools > Power Tools menu, but moves to the Search menu in the upcoming v3.0.

I wanted to see if Fuzzy Search could meet this real world test case. In Logos Bible Software I opened a few Bibles and chose Fuzzy Search from the Search menu. I copied the phrase "you will know them by their words" into the Search box and chose "All Open Resources" from the search target dropdown. A click on the green Go button brought back Matthew 7:20 in the NRSV as a 90% confidence hit, followed by Matthew 7:16, with 87% confidence.

Pretty cool!

(I should also point out that it found "Ye shall know them by their fruits" in the KJV, 74%, and "you will recognize them by their fruits" in the ESV, 72%.)

One of the new features that is implemented in the now-release-candidate Logos Bible Software 3.0 involves a significant enhancement to our sentence diagrammer.

I discussed this back in December 2005 and illustrated the new functionality with a short video. Check it out.

I bring it up again because first of all, blocking is cool. Secondly because I used the feature in preparation for the Sunday sermon and thought I'd share it. The pastor at the church I attend has been working through Mark's Gospel. I like to work ahead so I'm prepared for what he might say. This weekend, before the service, I did a quick block of Mark 4.1-9 so I had a decent grasp of the text before the sermon.

Now, a few disclaimers: I have no formal training in blocking, just my own reading, thinking and practice. My blocking style (as with most folks) is a bit haphazard. I don't have a systematic method for representing things. Indentions may be for grammatical/syntactic reasons (subordinate clauses, prepositional phrases, etc.) or because I think content is logically dependent on what precedes it. Or because I think I need to but am not quite sure why. It's just me thinking through the text; the process is more valuable than the output. When you block Mark 4.1-9 (go ahead, try it!) you will likely come out with something completely different. My point is that thinking through the passage at this level is the important part; the output only serves to remind you of your thoughts.

Also, I used the new Logos Bible Software 3.0 Highlighting features to highlight repeated words and phrases that I noticed. So when you see the highlights, that's where they came from. Yep, you can highlight more than books & Bibles! And I saved a PDF version of the diagram using the new PDF button on the diagrammer toolbar.

Larger Image | PDF

If you find this sort of thing helpful, then you'll really like the Lexham Clausal Outlines of the Greek New Testament. So check those out as well!

Over the weekend, I wrote an entry on my personal blog that folks who read the Logos Bible Software blog might be interested in.

I'm responding to another blog that discusses paragraph breaks in Ephesians 5. My post doesn't dispute anything in that article, it just points out other resources to consult when looking at that sort of thing. Things like:

• The paragraph formatting of the underlying Greek edition and the formatting of other editions.
• Clause boundaries and structure.
• Further general importance of looking beyond the word level when studying.

Check it out!

We just posted 35 new training videos to the Training area of Logos.com.

The videos show how to most effectively use Logos Bible Software for biblical language study. And, yes, we have videos for both Greek and Hebrew.

In the coming months we will be producing a lot more web-based video tutorials and have some refinements in mind for presenting them…but I thought you'd want to know about the first batch to come out of the oven.

There have been a number of changes and improvements to the syntax feature of LDLS 3.0 in the last couple of beta releases. To obtain Beta 7, visit the Logos Beta Download page. You'll need to install both the LDLS 3.0 Beta 7 download and the 3.0 Beta Resources in order to get all the functionality I describe below.

I'll start off with what's new with the Syntax Search dialog, which can be accessed by choosing Search > Syntax Search from the main LDLS menu. The Syntax Search dialog has seen a lot of exciting changes. If you're interested in syntax at all, I encourage you to use and abuse these new features. If you find any bugs, log onto the beta newsgroup on our news server and let us know.

In Episodes I and II, I showed how every word in a Libronix DLS resource is a potential link, whether English or another language. I hope you've started going around your digital library double-clicking everywhere.

Here's one more little tidbit: the "ubiquitous link principle" extends beyond resources. It even works in some reports!

While playing around with the Biblical People report that will ship with Libronix DLS version 3.0 I discovered quite accidentally that I could double-click a Hebrew or Greek name at the top of the report and look it up in a lexicon.

So, for example, I'm looking at Obed in the Biblical People report and want to consult my reference works to read more about him. I double-click on the English, Hebrew, or Greek version of his name to open Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, HALOT, or BDAG, respectively.

(Note: Libronix DLS 3.0 Beta 7 required; your mileage may vary depending on the resources you own and how you've configured your English, Hebrew and Greek KeyLinks).

These are the articles on Obed that open when I do this:

I have to hand it to the developers...they've implemented the concept of KeyLink-ability with remarkable consistency.

All I can say is...Click On!

I've blogged about the OpenText.org Syntactically Annotated Greek New Testament in the past (see the Syntax Archives).

The folks who do the work on the OpenText.org project have been doing a lot of work since I last blogged about the project, and the result is that we have a vastly updated data set. The primary new goodie is the consolidation of the Clause and Word Group information.

Last week, I showed how every word in every Libronix DLS resource is a link. The focus of that post was interacting with English text in resources; today I want to follow up with some observations about interacting with text in other languages.

Just as you can double-click on an English word in a resource and jump to a reference work that has an entry on that word, you can also interact with Greek text in the same way.

Baker New Testament Commentary includes a section for each biblical passage discussing "Greek words, phrases and constructions." When reading the commentary you might encounter a page that looks like this:

Some of the Greek words here may be unfamiliar to you, or you might become intrigued by a word and want to study it further. To read more about ἀσθενής, for example, double-click it and a lexicon will open directly to the entry for that word. For me, BDAG opens to an in-depth article about the word, and I can take my study in any number of directions from there.

(Bonus tip: You can open more than one lexicon the same way; just go to Tools | Options | Keylink, select the desired Data Type (e.g., Greek) and change Number of Windows to Open on a KeyLink to a number larger than 1.)

If I double-click on the word κερδήσω, Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New Testament (included with Scholar's Silver) opens instead of BDAG. This is because κερδήσω is an inflected form of the word, not the dictionary form.

ANLEX, as it is called, is worth its weight in gold for this simple reason: it lists every inflected form in the Greek New Testament...so if the word is in the NT you'll get a hit in ANLEX. I can either consult the brief lexical entry here or double-click the headword κερδαίνω to dig deeper with BDAG or another lexicon.

Just remember...with Libronix, every word's a link!

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy reading Rick's discussion of KeyLinking between lexicons.

Proceed to Episode III >>

Libronix DLS, our digital library system, is based in no small part on linkage between texts. Today I want to introduce you to the quiet, unobtrusive links you may have overlooked.

You should care about this topic because links are one of the key features that make a digital library more than a pile of texts on your hard drive...and that sets Logos Bible Software apart from the competition.

Every user is familiar with the obvious links that appear in Logos resources: references to Bible verses, Josephus or Word Biblical Commentary; links to footnotes; or cross-links between articles in an encyclopedia.

These links are obvious because of their color. "Click me," they shout. They are elevevated to a special status in the digital library because the author of the book gave them special status: "Here's a pointer to the verse I'm discussing…it's Genesis 3:1." Blue text.

What many users miss out on—and it's a shame, really, because there's a great deal of utility here—is that every word of every Logos resource is a potential link to something.

Let me say it again…every word's a link!

These are the shy and retiring links that don't draw attention to themselves…but they may turn out to be at least as useful as their boisterous brethren.

These links are not visually distinguished in any way; they are just all the other words in a resource, set in normal black text. But double-click on one of these guys and cool stuff happens…even better, you get to control what cool stuff happens!

When you double-click on a word in a resource, the Libronix DLS knows what language the word is and seeks to open a resource that will tell you something useful about that word.

You can try this right now…open up a Bible to Genesis 3:1 and double-click the word serpent. What happens on your machine?

On my machine, the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible opens to a fascinating article on serpents in the mythology and iconology of the Ancient Near East, its appearances in the Hebrew Bible, and in later writings.

Depending on how you have configured your machine and which books you own, you might see an equally fascinating article in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature discussing the serpent in Beowulf, Genesis B, Canterbury Tales and so on. Or maybe you'll see the entry for serpent in Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, or The New Bible Dictionary.

If what you see isn't as cool as you would like it to be, check out the tutorial article on English KeyLinking at Logos.com, which provides a strategy for configuring your preferences in this area. I think you'll find it well worth the ten minutes it takes to read the article and customize for your own particular interests.

Proceed to Episode II >>

If you've been a Logos Bible Software user for a long time, or if you're relatively new to the software, chances are the Support area of the Logos web site has some training articles for you.

The articles are broken into four areas:

• Basic Usability
• Original Languages
• Reference
• Advanced

Articles from Getting to Know Your Library to How To Use Verb Rivers to Creating Your Own Timeline can be read, referenced and reviewed.

Check 'em out!

Another feature in the upcoming LDLS 3.0 release has to do with sentence diagramming.

Yes, we're aware that there are more ways to diagram a sentence than you can shake a stick at (pun intended). One of these methods is the "Block" or "Sentence Flow" diagram.

The linked video presentation walks through using the new feature. It is all contained within the present sentence diagrammer. The steps are simple:

1. Create a New Sentence Diagram document (or open an existing one)
2. Insert a passage
3. When inserting a passage, select the "As Wrapping Columns" option
4. Enter the passage and version information
5. Click Insert Passage

That's it. Now you can click and drag text around as you see fit. I should note that I didn't think too much about this particular block diagram. Looking at it in retrospect, there are things that need to be done differently. But since it is an LDLS document, I can just open the diagram and edit it later to clean that stuff up.

Video: 950x750, Flash, approx. 2 megs.

One cool feature here is that you can insert more than one column of text. So, as I did in the video, you could insert one column of Greek text and another column of English text, and match them up.

Or — hold on to your hats — you could enter different accounts of an event in the synoptic gospels and block-diagram them in parallel. You can use the stick diagramming symbols (like, say, brackets, lines or arrows) to draw attention to parallel groups or features. On top of that, all of the Visual Markup features are available in the sentence diagrammer.

All done? Go to File | Export. Look, you can save it as a PDF to show your friends, or to put on your web page or blog!

I love the work of Edward Tufte, a data design guru who writes beautiful books that also serve to illustrate his ideas about design.

I was first introduced to Tufte's books shortly after I graduated from college, and immediately asked for one for Christmas (they're not cheap). I find that his ideas challenge me to pay attention to design in everything I do, and help me think about how and why design matters.

That's why I was excited to see that a new feature in Libronix DLS version 3.0 (the first beta release was recently posted, and all I can say is WOW!) is rooted in one of Tufte's ideas for conveying a lot of information in a compact, unobtrusive form.

In the second-generation Exegetical Guide, there is a small graph next to each word from the passage. It's called a "Lemma Density Graph" and it's an example of what's known as a sparkline.

Sparkline is a term coined by Edward Tufte to describe "small, high-resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images. Sparklines are data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics." You can read all about sparklines in this draft chapter from Tufte's new book, along with a lengthy series of posts on how sparklines are being used in various contexts.

In the example below, taken from the new Exegetical Guide, the Lemma Density Graph sparkline indicates the density of the lemma ὅτι across the New Testament. The more a particular biblical book uses ὅτι, the taller the bar is for that book. Of course, the height is proportional to the total number of words in each book so that the graph is not skewed toward long books like the Gospels.

As you can see, the word occurs 1296 times in the New Testament. Each category of Bible book (Gospels, Acts, Pauline epistles, other epistles, Revelation) gets its own color and you can see that a yellow bar near the end is the big winner.

So which book is it dominating the graph here? By hovering the mouse over the bar in the chart, I can see that it's 1 John and the word is used 76 times.

This is not a surprise to anyone who has studied 1 John and noted the tight, logical progression employed by the author. The sparkline provides a great visual illustration of this rhetorical characteristic, and it's viewable at a glance, inline with the rest of the information.

I can even interact with the graph in ways that take me a step deeper in my study of ὅτι...If I click the 1 John bar, Graph Bible Search Results opens and I can choose any number of graphs to tease meaning from the data (e.g., Number of Hits in Chapter / Number of Words in Chapter) or export it to Excel and work with it there.

These sparklines can draw out all manner of word usage patterns such as hapax legomena, words peculiar to a single book or author, or words that appear more often in certain genres.

I think it's a very nifty little feature, one that I trust our users will find to be a helpful addition to version 3.0. I also think it's very cool that this feature is rooted in solid design principles from one of the leading minds on the subject. One of the things I appreciate about our application is that the developers pay attention to "small details" of design so that it not only functions well but looks great, too.

(Note: If you get excited by this post and decide to install the beta, please note that our beta releases are unsupported and be sure to read the warnings first.)

I've briefly discussed searching OpenText.org material at the word level; this post discusses searching at the clause level, with word group level stuff in the mix.

There's even a groovy video of the search I describe so you can see exactly what's going on (see bottom of this article). One take, no cuts. This is done with the current beta version of Logos Bible Software (3.0 Beta 1) and an extra syntax searching component currently in development.

I was recently dispatched to Melbourne to visit Frank Andersen and Dean Forbes. One of the things I was assigned to discover — other than what kangaroo chili tastes like* — was the underlying linguistic/textual/grammatical philosophy of the Andersen-Forbes database (hereafter, A-F). Sure, they've marked the entire Hebrew Bible for syntax, but what exactly does that mean?

http://blog.logos.com/archives/2005/11/syntax_andersen.html Consider the simple graph to the right. A graph, you will recall, is a diagram made up of labels and lines. This particular graph has some further special characteristics: (1) This is a directed graph, because the lines are arrows that indicate which labels are “on top,” so to speak; if this were a corporate organization chart, the arrows would always point from manager to employee. (2) This graph is acyclic, which is a fancy word meaning “no cycles,” which is a fancy way of saying that if you follow the arrows in the direction they are pointing, you will never visit the same label twice. Put another way, if no matter where you start, you will eventually reach the end. (3) This particular graph is a tree, because it has exactly one topmost label (the CEO in our org chart), and each label has one and only one arrow that points to it. That is, each employee has only one boss — wouldn’t that be nice?

I think that I shall never see
a graph as lovely as a tree.

Why did we choose graphs to represent syntax instead of something else? Short answer: Because.

The long answer, however, is much more interesting: Because every method of graphically showing the syntactic form of a sentence or clause has its pros and cons. Graphs have a lot of pros, and not many cons.

Good question. For mathematicians and linguists, a graph is a diagram that consists of nodes and edges. For the rest of us, who must communicate using words that we hope others will readily understand, graphs are diagrams that consist of points and lines between them. For our purposes, any diagram that consists of points and lines is a graph.

You may have noticed I haven't been blogging much lately. Mostly, I've been too busy working on the Andersen-Forbes Hebrew Syntax project. As part of that work, I recently went down to Melbourne, Australia to visit with Frank Andersen and Dean Forbes, the gentlemen themselves. It's rare that the two of them are ever in the same room, since Dean lives in California and Frank lives half a world away in Melbourne. When we found out that Dean would be visiting Melbourne for a month to work with Frank, we decided that I should crash the party.*

Last week, I posted an article about "Word Groups" in the OpenText.org Syntactic Annotation. I promised some follow-up; and now it's time for that.

There are obvious uses for this level of annotation in the realm of searching, but what about in just reading the text? Or in working through a passage exegetically?

The good news is that the visualization (graph) supports most operations you're used to performing from a standard morphologically tagged Greek NT in Logos Bible Software. This article is about some of those options.

One of the neatest features supported in the next release of Logos Bible Software is the Biblical People database. It has been included in the alpha releases since the end of June, but I wanted to give everyone a chance to see it.

The example here shows a visualization of all of the biblically-attested relationships of Aaron. The graph shows everyone Aaron is related to and the nature of the relationship. Nodes in the graph are colored by gender, if known, and labeled by relationship. Every relationship is attested to by one or more Bible verses, shown at the left side of the graph. Clicking on a person’s name regenerates the graph with them at the center.

The graphs can be generated for any person in the Bible, and a specialized version of the graph is included in the Passage Guide to show all of the people in the selected passage and their relationships to each other.

Logos Bible Software is more than just an electronic version of a paper library. And it is tools like this that demonstrate how software can help you see and explore the Bible in ways you never could before.

Since Bob posted about the sentence diagrammer, I thought I'd follow that up just to let folks know that these groovy new syntax graphs we're developing (see previous post) are able to be copied into the Sentence Diagrammer.

Really.

See? Click on each image to see what happens. The first image is a right-click and copy (the blue arrows and such indicate what is selected). The second image is the syntax graph pasted into the sentence diagrammer as a live object. Arrows are arrows; words are words. You can grab stuff and move it around.

Small disclaimer: The first graphic shows stuff like "add to general notes" on the right-click menu. At present, it is unclear whether we'll support notes within these graph resources.

[Note: this is one in a series of posts on Greek syntax and Logos Bible Software. See the Greek category for a full listing. The immediately previous post is here.]

As mentioned in a previous post, the OpenText.org syntactic analysis consists of three primary levels of annotation:

• Base Level Analysis (Word)
• Word Group Analysis
• Clause Analysis

This post will introduce you to the Word Group level of analysis. If this sort of stuff floats your boat, then read on.

Logos Bible Software has a sentence diagramming tool, but until recently I didn’t know that the “traditional line diagrams” it supports have a name: Reed-Kellogg diagrams.

Searching on the name led me to a site with some other, older diagramming systems. The photo here shows Genesis 1:1 diagrammed by the Clark method. (Do we need to add support for this?)

The next release of Logos Bible Software will support flowing columns of text with user-adjustable margins and tabs. It is hard to explain but easy to use, and it is designed to support the outlining / phrasing / aligning / arcing advocated in some recent guides to exegesis. (These diagrams still support the line drawing objects, allowing you to mix shapes and flowing text.)

We are calling these “sentence flow diagrams,” after Gordon Fee’s description in New Testament Exegesis. But if you know a better or more accurate name, let us know!

I introduced a series of posts on upcoming Greek Syntax tools last week. This is the second post (first post after the intro, you haven't missed anything) in that series.

We have two different data sets that will be made available. If you're at either the ETS or SBL conferences in November, you can see them demo'd. To keep my sanity (and yours) I'll only discuss one data set at a time.

This first series of posts will discuss the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament, as implemented within Logos Bible Software.

Interested in utilizing syntax within your study of the New Testament? Read on!

Part I

Here's another of Wendell Stavig's questions to one of my earlier posts:

What is a MARC record?

MARC stands for Machine Readable Catalog, and is a Library of Congress standard way of specifying resource metadata, that is, information about the book. Think of it as an electronic card catalog entry. You could use the MARC record information to do a library search, and if you printed this information out and took it to your local library, your librarian would probably know what she was looking at, but mostly the MARC record represents cataloging information that is used by the Libronix DLS to help organize and find resources in your library.

If you want to learn more about the MARC format in all its splendor, the Library of Congress has a page for you. If you follow that link, I recommend that you refrain from operating heavy machinery for at least twelve hours afterward. Better make it twenty-four, just to be safe.

Anyway, this illustrates one of the things that sets the Libronix DLS apart from other Bible software programs: We really have built an electronic library, and not simply a Bible study program. To be sure, the Libronix DLS is an excellent Bible study program, but that's not all it is; the features we've built for Bible study are simply specialized ways to access certain kinds of information in your electronic library shelves.

Say it with me: It's not a program, it's a library.

This is why, for example, we call books “resources” — a library has all sorts of resources, not just books. (So do we: A video resource isn't a “book,” it's ... a video resource.) We are not tied down to presenting only one kind of information. Just like a library.

This is also why the My Library browser shows you not only the actual title of each book, but also alternate titles, popular titles, and any abbreviated titles we know about. You can type "Little Kittel" into the My Library browser to find The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume. Or you can find them by subject. Or by author. There's more than one way to find the book you're looking for.

Just like a library.

Earlier, I wrote an article titled Visual Filters and Verb Rivers (Part I) in which I described the use of a particular visual filter, the Morphology Filter in the Biblical Languages Addin.

That article got long, and I promised to follow it up later. Well ... it's later. And this is the follow-up.

The Morphology Filter is good for word-level and paragraph-level work. That is, when you are reading through the text and noticing morphological trends, the Morphology Filter helps these sorts of things jump out at you.

Upon noticing what seems to be a concentration of a particular morphological criteria in a particular paragraph or section, the next question is: Does this happen elsewhere in the book, or is this unique? In other words, with the Morphology Filter, you're looking at the trees (or perhaps a particular grove of trees). But you need to step back and look at the whole forest now. This is what Verb Rivers help you to do.

(Holding back the urge to mix metaphors and crack a joke about going "over the river and through the woods" ... )

It would not do to have a syntactically tagged Greek NT without something similar for the Hebrew text. So we are partnering with Francis Andersen and Dean Forbes to make their three decades of work available to you for display and searching, too.

I've been working through 1Ti 4.11-16 in my personal study. One thing that jumps out in this passage is the amount of imperative verbs relative to 1Ti 1.1-4.10. These six verses contain 10 imperatives; nine of them are in the second person singular (thus likely addressed to the reader, Timothy).

This is an important feature of the passage (and in the larger discourse of the epistle), and it should be looked into.

But how does Logos Bible Software help you become aware of this sort of thing? There are two features (at least) that help one "see" these things. Visual Filters and Verb Rivers. These are available in the Biblical Languages Addin, which is already a part of some Logos packages (see bottom of this product page for details).

This article explores what sort of information these addins convey.

Morphologically analyzed texts have been an important feature of Bible software packages for years. Logos offers several different morphological analyses for the Greek NT and we will soon have three different analyses for the Hebrew. Recently we announced or shipped analyzed versions of the Old Testament Greek Pseudepigrapha, the Apostolic Fathers in Greek, and the Works of Philo. (The Works of Josephus aren’t far behind.)

But what if you want to look at syntax? There have not been a lot of tools available. Logos is partnering with OpenText.org to change that, and you soon will be able to see (and search!) a syntactically annotated Greek NT. The image below is an early view of just one of the ways you will be able to use this data.

When I am browsing electronic texts I tend to follow a lot of rabbit trails. One of my frustrations with web browsers and other hyperlinked systems is that my navigation history is a straight line. I can follow links from A to B to C to D, but if I back up to C and follow an alternate link to E, the system forgets that I was at D.

Real world browsing involves following lots of parallel paths, and this is especially true in Bible study, where you want to follow lots of cross references on a single theme, each of which may lead you to other ideas, without losing track of where you started.

The next release of the Libronix Digital Library System records all of your navigation and can present it as a tree, not just a list. So while Back and Forward work just as they always have, if you want to revisit one of the branches your study took earlier in your session, you can open the History Dialog and find it quickly.

(The History Dialog is already available as part of the Libronix DLS v2.2 Alpha.)

I am excited about the new History Dialog not just because it is a feature I have wanted for a long time, but because it is representative of the innovation in the Libronix Digital Library System. To the best of my knowledge, this is one of the first visual tools for navigating your browsing history in any hypertext system. (A similar feature was added to one web browser just weeks ago, and it has been suggested for others.)

We are not content to simply apply the established technologies and interfaces to Bible study tools – we want to be on the cutting edge with new and better solutions.

If you've been to one of Morris Proctor's Camp Logos training seminars, then you're familiar with the cry of "Tools, Options, KeyLink!"

I know I occasionally need a reminder of this, and chances are you may need a reminder too. Now is as good a time as any, especially since Eli's recent blog entry about data types reminds me that facility with KeyLinking (how you look up stuff using data types) is something that effective users of Logos Bible Software seem to take for granted.

But knowing where to go to set your KeyLink preferences (once again, this time for Moe: "Tools, Options, KeyLink!") is only half the battle. Understanding what happens when a KeyLink is invoked, and knowing a little more about the resources available for KeyLinking is necessary as well.

You might want to check out a few tutorials we have in the Support area of the Logos web site. These are listed in the order in which they were written. I wrote the Greek KeyLinking article to help folks understand what the different targets were and how KeyLink order affects lookup. A colleague then wrote the Hebrew KeyLinking article, and he followed that up with the English KeyLinking article. (If you haven't figured it out, I'm a bit myopic when it comes to Greek!) All three articles have the same basic idea: understand the feature, know your resources, select your KeyLink order; but the each article applies the ideas to particular languages and available resources.

So, here are the articles:

• Greek KeyLinking: A Strategy
• Hebrew KeyLinking: A Strategy
• English KeyLinking: A Strategy

Wendell Stavig* posed some great questions in his comments to one of my earlier posts, and since my computer is bogged down running a conversion script that takes about forty-five minutes to run (top-secret project!) I'll go ahead and answer them. Out of order, of course.

[C]ould you please explain some of the data in the Help | About This Resource window?

...

How you use the information under datatypes?

As far as I'm concerned, datatypes and keylinking are the two most important concepts in the Libronix DLS.

The Libronix Digital Library System is a very modular framework. The user interface is separate from the system internals. This modularity not only makes for a better application architecture, it allows us to deliver new features and user interface without changing the underlying system. (Below I am going to show you how to add a “Toggle Zoom” feature right now, without downloading anything.)

It is always a pain to switch from keyboard to mouse and back. “Power users” tend to master the keyboard shortcuts of their favorite applications so that they can keep their hands in one place.

The keyboard is not as convenient as the mouse, though, for navigating a page full of hyperlinks. But when you are following lots of links it is a real pain to keep moving your mouse between the list of links and the back button, or moving your hand back to the keyboard to press “Alt-Left”.

Mouse gestures are a powerful shortcut that can cut your mouse travel without touching the keyboard.

In an open resource window, click and hold the right mouse button while dragging it just a short distance to the left and then releasing the button. This “gesture” executes the Go > Back command. (Assuming you have already followed a link or scrolled, so there is somewhere to go back to.) Right-click and drag to the right executes the Go > Forward command. Up moves to the previous article, down to the next. A “C” shape (left, down, right) toggles the contents pane.

I am not sure who invented mouse gestures, but we first saw them in Opera and Mozilla. These browsers support a long list of gestures, but I don’t often make an “M” shape to view the tags for a page, or “S” to view the source. I do use forward and back all the time and can’t imagine working without them.

I call mouse gestures a hidden feature because they don’t have any visible user interface and so most users never find them. But now you know. A complete list of the gestures supported in the Libronix DLS is in the Libronix DLS Help, under Appendixes > Gestures. Give them a try, and let us know if there are any other commands you would like to access through gestures.

I received the following comment regarding my post about Logos Workspaces:

I saw your post regarding your workspace in Libronix and I had a question: How do you open the same book twice? You did this for the ESV and I can not figure it out for the life of me. Any help would be wonderful. Thanks

I suppose this really isn't prominently documented. But in Logos Bible Software, if you hold down the SHIFT key while clicking a link, you open a new version of the target resource.

So if you see a link for a Bible reference and SHIFT+Click the reference, a new version of your preferred Bible will open if you already have a copy open. This is very handy — it means you won't lose your place in your primary Bible window (and any linked windows) by following bunny trails.

I usually keep a second version of the ESV open, and I also mark it as the Reference Target Window (the little red book icon in the book icon bar that has the arrow pointing to itself). That way, whenever I click a Bible reference, it will jump to that specific window — and not cause any of my other linked windows to jump around.

This SHIFT+Click logic carries to opening books in general. So if you're in My Library and do the SHIFT+Click book-opening dance, you'll open a new copy of the book you clicked.

It's amazing what you learn when you write a blog article. A few folks here at the office read this one and told me I was missing out — that there are all sorts of ways to open another instance of the same resource.

Some of these ways to open another copy of the same book include:

• Window | New Window will spawn a new instance of the current window.
• CTRL + SHIFT + N will spawn a new instance of the current window.
• I've been told that in future versions of the LDLS (currently in alpha testing) will support multiple opening in the "Go"/Quick Nav box. So if you type 'ESV' and then ENTER, then ENTER again, two instances of the ESV will open.

Rick wrote earlier about how you can go from a headword in one lexicon to another by right-clicking and executing a keylink from the headword. This is true, and a very useful feature.

But I will show you a still more excellent way ...

Earlier, I wrote about how to set up the Quick Navigation Bar (aka, “the Go box”) to quickly open resources. It can be used to navigate to references as well, and in the Libronix DLS, just about everything is a reference. I'll look at two in this post: citations of Bible verses, and lexicon headwords.

The other day, Rick Brannan mentioned the Libronix DLS “Go” box casually in passing, as if everyone has that feature turned on and knows how to use it. Since Rick and I work with LDLS resource files all the time, we often stop thinking about titles and authors and start calling books by their project names: CHAPSOT, ANLEX, BHSWTS40.

We also use the identifiers to navigate quickly to the resources using the "Go" box that Rick was talking about. This is so integral to the way that I use the LDLS that I forget that most people don't know about these shorthand identifiers, and furthermore, many people don't even have the "Go" box turned on in the first place.

Inconceivable!

Logos Bible Software supports the concept of a workspace. Workspaces are used in different ways by all sorts of people. The basic idea is for the software to keep track of your window arrangement, open texts, linked windows and other stuff.

Awhile back, on my personal blog, I blogged on how I've got my primary workspace set up. I thought it would be fun to share that here too. Click the above link or the picture to head to the article.

I've had a decent amount of feedback from folks that this article helped them understand a bit more about workspaces and gave them some insights to relationships between texts. If you work in the New Testament, and if you work through the Greek word-by-word, then you may enjoy checking it out.

On Saturday morning I was studying the first part of 1Ti 4.6:

If you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, (1Ti 4.6a, ESV)

When I was looking into the term "good servant", I noticed that in the Greek it was an adjective and a noun that agreed in case and number. So, I wondered, what other things are called "good" in the Pastoral Epistles? This article explores ways to specify this sort of search with the Graphical Query Editor.

[I should note that I have been working through the Pastoral Epistles for some time. I blog about the Pastoral Epistles at http://PastoralEpistles.com and have some other information on my personal web site.]