Simple change to the dash in Get Verses: Citation
Hi guys!
I use the Get Verses Feature all the time. Love it. One quick question. Are you able to change the dash between the verses of the reference when it populates?
Here's what is currently happening. Say you type a verse reference in Microsoft Word. Then you highlight the word, and click Ctrl+Alt+A to trigger Get Verses. Something like John 3:16-17. You use Citation mode to include the reference of the verse, etc. What comes back for the reference is just a little different. John 3:16–17. What's the difference? The symbol used for the dash between 16 and 17. Instead of the dash we use to trigger the function, (a “hyphen-minus” [Unicode code point: U+002D]), it comes back as a longer dash (an “en dash” [Unicode code point: U+2013]).
Why is it important? In Microsoft Word, for example, if I try to use the newly populated reference that Accordance gives me to trigger the “Get Verses” function again, Accordance simply errors. It can't do it. I have to go back and change the dash to the proper one. Then it works again.
So…
Help from the community.. Does this happen to you guys? Or is it just me? (Very possible it's just my set up, so want to confirm)
Help from the devs. If it's just a simple code change to populate the reference with the same dash, awesome. If it ends up being a rewriting of the whole app from the ground up… no worries. lol
Thanks for looking into it!
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Since the en dash is the correct character for a number range, returning a hyphen would be a regression. Better to allow the look up to work with an en dash.
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Got it. Thanks for the heads up.
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Can I follow up on this? Does the en dash actually work for the verse look up for you? Because it doesn't for me. On my keyboard, clicking the “minus” key (both the number pad and the regular keyboard) brings up the hyphen character rather than the en dash character.
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Ah - Maybe I misunderstand what you are saying. My version of Accordance is too old to support the Get Verses feature. But looking at the docs, I think you mean that the reference in the *Get Verses Dialog* is changed from a hyphen to an en dash, not that the citation returned to clipboard or inserted into Word contains an en dash.
If this is what you mean, then I agree with you and see no reason to change the hyphen to an en dash in the dialog. But I'd definitely want the citation returned to clipboard or Word with the reference using an en dash rather than a hyphen. Seeing people type verse ranges using hyphens makes me sad.
I don't use Windows or Mac, so I don't know what easy ways there are to set up typing an en dash, but the Linux way of using a compose key followed by a key combination that makes logical sense is miles better than anything I have ever seen on other platforms.
For the record, Unicode contains a lot of different dash characters used for different purposes: https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/list-unicodeset.jsp?a=[:General_Category=Dash_Punctuation:] and that's not including the minus sign at U+2212. Funnily enough, in looking at this I see that en dash is not the right character! There's a figure dash! Learn something new every day. Though a quick check of my system shows that many more fonts support en dash than figure dash.
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Hmmm - although, now I'm not sure about that figure dash. It's use looks slightly more specialised.
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Woah. You're hardcore! For a brief moment I thought about going to linux. But backed out. lol. Couldn't figure out how to get the newer accordance to work on it.
Yeah I was surprised at how many ways to make a dash line when I was figuring out the root cause of the problem. Who knew? lol
Yep, all I was hoping for was that the dash between the reference that gets copied to my clipboard (and then pasted into word in the “Get Verses Feature.”) is the same as whatever dash it is that shows up when I hit the “-” button on the numpad of my keyboard, or the “-” button (to the right of the “0” key on the top row) 😅
Either way, if it's a lot of work, I'm totally good to keep doing what I'm doing. 😊
Thanks for following up on this by the way.0 -
> Better to allow the look up to work with an en dash
Yes, the look up should definitely be flexible enough to use as input the same format that Accordance is giving as output.
David Purton Wait—are you using Accordance on Linux? Please share how you did that! 🙏🏼
I've been entertaining the idea of switching to Linux as my primary OS and macOS as secondary, but Accordance not working on Linux is a huge obstacle to that.
> My version of Accordance is too old to support the Get Verses feature.
Hmm… are you using an old version because you were only able to get old versions running under some sort of emulator?
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Brandon Zylstra I run accordance 10 under Wine.
It works, but performance is not spectacular.
However, you would need to be very committed to try and make this work with a new set up.
Accordance 11 and later do not work with any version of wine, so you need to use version 10. Accordance 10 does not work with current versions of wine, so you need to use wine version 5. Accordance 10 is no longer supported, so to install modules you need to unpack them on another computer, manually copy the files across and then ask for an unlock code.
(I haven't tried newer versions of wine for a while, if anyone wants to give a status update.)
The only reason I persist is because I am stubborn and I refuse to run windows even in a VM.
I wait for the cloud version of it ever comes.
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