Building the diagram
Split / Join
Tap any word to break the line
before it; the new line is indented one level. Tap the first word of a line and the
break is undone — so the same tap both splits and rejoins. Dragging a line's grip up onto the
line above also rejoins it.
Indent
Drag a line's grip sideways; it snaps
to a 36 pt grid.
Annotating
Anchoring
Every mark attaches to its nearest
word, so ink follows the text when the lines reflow.
Pencil and finger
Once Nous has seen an Apple
Pencil, the Pencil draws and your finger handles the page — scrolling, selecting, reaching
for a grip. Without a Pencil, your finger draws. Overrule it under ⋯.
Line
Snaps to true horizontal or vertical
within 8°.
Shapes
Box, oval, triangle and the
cross-reference square, all dragged corner to corner. Tapping a word with the oval or the
triangle fits one round it. Erasing a shape's empty interior is ignored — go over its
edge.
Moving things
In Move/Select, touching
anything already drawn picks it up: drag to move it, or pull a corner to resize. Lines and
shapes have handles at their corners; freehand strokes and chains just move.
⌘⌫ takes away whatever is held, and tapping the paper puts it down.
Eraser
Rubs out whatever it passes over — ink,
lines, boxes, arrows, and the underline, box or symbol on a word. Lemma highlights are left
alone, since those belong to every occurrence; clear those from the word inspector.
Nibs
Tapping Pen offers seven: the
highlighter, then fineliner, ballpoint, pencil, marker, brush and calligraphy. The
highlighter lays a broad see-through band under the words; the rest write over them. Each
is kept with the stroke, so a page can hold several.
Line styles
Tapping Line opens a menu of
weights. Thin, regular, dotted and double are ordinary strokes. Extra thick is
different: it lays a section break across the page, opens a gap in the flow, and gives you a
title to fill in. Tap the same boundary again to remove it.
Selecting
Tap a word to select it. Tap it twice
and every occurrence of its lemma on the page is selected. In Move/Select, dragging
from bare paper draws a box that gathers up every word it touches. With a drawing tool in
hand, a tap on a word — rather than a stroke — hands over to Move/Select and selects it;
press P to pick the pen back up.
Colouring
Nothing is coloured until you say so.
With a selection, tapping a colour highlights all of it. If the selection came from tapping
twice, the colour follows that lemma wherever it occurs; otherwise it is laid on those words
alone. Tapping the same colour straight afterwards takes it off again — but a colour
never removes anything on its own, so a selection you had forgotten about cannot lose its
marks. esc deselects.
Your own English
Tap a verse number in
the margin and the whole verse is laid out above a field. Say it in your own words and it
appears out to the right of the page, level with that verse, where the whole passage can be
read straight down in your English. Enter takes you to the next verse.
A verse number you have translated is underlined, and tapping your English opens it again
to reword. Nothing about it moves a word of the Greek — the diagram is untouched; only the
page gets wider. It goes into the sermon outline under each heading, above the
diagram.
Context
A faint line sits in the margin above the
first verse and below the last, offering the rest of the chapter or the whole
book. Tap one and those verses are laid out around your passage, to be read and marked
up like any others — they are set back a little on the page, so it is always plain which
words the sermon is on. ↩ back to… returns to the passage alone.
Doing this does not change what you are preaching on. The passage is what you
searched for, and only the reference box, the book and chapter menus, or following a link
change it. The big idea stays with it, and the sermon outline exports it and not the
context.
Size of the page
Nous opens at whatever fits
between the two rails, so nothing is ever hidden behind them. From there, pinch with two
fingers to make the page larger or smaller; panning carries on at the same time.
⌘0 is its own size, ⌘9 fits it again. Turning the iPad refits it, unless you
have already chosen a size yourself. The size is only how close you are looking: the
diagram, the ink and the exported picture are unchanged by it.
Colour
The palette runs down the left of the
window, beside the page rather than over it. The same 18 colours twice: full strength for
the pen, and their lighter tints for the highlighter. Reaching for a tint picks up the
highlighter; reaching for a full colour puts it down again.
With a keyboard
If something disappears
The log
Under ⋯, What has been
removed lists everything Nous has taken away or replaced, with the time and the reason —
an erased stroke, a sync that rewrote the page, a cleared search. If work goes missing, look
there first and it will say what happened.
Undo
Goes back forty steps, including a page
rewritten by a sync. It is emptied when you open a different book.
Starting again
Under ⋯ there is one way
to clear your work, at three scopes: this passage, this book, or
every book. It takes the lines, ink, colours, symbols, arrows, section breaks, notes
and your own English — never the text itself.
Nothing it removes is thrown away. A copy is kept for ten days under
What I have removed…, and Bring it back puts it where it was. A restore only
ever adds, so anything done since is kept. The bin syncs, so a slip on the iPad can be
undone on the Mac.
Where the text comes from
Greek
SBLGNT, © 2010 Society of Biblical
Literature and Logos Bible Software, with MorphGNT tagging.
Hebrew
Westminster Leningrad Codex — public
domain. Lemmas and morphology from the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project, CC BY 4.0,
with lemma forms and glosses from the Open Scriptures Hebrew Lexicon.
Finding and marking
Find
Search the parsing itself. Tap
Imperative to light up every imperative in the passage; add Aorist to narrow it
to aorist imperatives. Chips combine, and the box accepts a lemma or an English gloss.
Accents are ignored, so λυπεω finds λυπέω.
Apply
Highlight, Underline or Box every match at
once, in the wheel's current colour.
Symbols
The symbols run down the right of the
window, beside the page. Select a word or several and tap one, and it goes on all of them.
With nothing selected, tapping one arms the tool and you tap words yourself. A symbol sits
on the word, see-through like the highlighter, and moves with it. Tap a word to apply, tap
again to remove. Hold a symbol down to pin it to the top of the rail or hide it; the pinned
strip can be dragged into whatever order you like. ＋ Library at the foot opens
four thousand more.
Hebrew
An Old Testament book is laid out right
to left: lines begin at the right margin and each level of indent steps in from the right.
Everything else behaves the same. The word inspector links to HALOT rather than BDAG,
and to your Hebrew text rather than the Greek — both set under ⋯.
Links
Tap a word and write a reference — two rings
and the reference, as on the worksheet. Numbers alone mean this book. Tapping the rings in
Move/Select takes you there; if the reference is to a book you have not loaded, it
opens in Accordance instead.
Cross-ref
Drag a square round a quotation or
allusion and write what it quotes — Isaiah 49:8. Tapping its label opens that passage
in Accordance, in the English translation set under ⋯.
Choosing one
Either kind opens a sheet with a
field big enough to write in with a Pencil, and a Choose… button beside it: three
columns — book, chapter, verse — that you scroll and tap. What it offers is read out of the
books installed on this device, so it can never offer a verse that is not there; a book you
have not installed is still listed, you just type the numbers yourself. Whatever you choose
is written into the field, which you can then edit by hand.
Two at once
＋ a second reference lets one
link or box point at two places — a quotation that turns up twice, say. Both are drawn on
the page, and tapping asks which one you meant.
Finding a passage
Reference
Type it in the box at the top left:
2 Corinthians 1:12–2:4, Rom 8:1-17, 1 Jn 2, Phlm 4-7. Ranges may
cross a chapter break, which chapters alone cannot. Abbreviations and 2 Cor style
both work.
Its own page
Each range keeps its own diagram,
ink and notes, so 1:12–2:4 and chapter 1 are separate pieces of work.
Notes and concordance
Note
Tap a word and type in the Note box. Words
carrying a note show a small dot.
Concordance
Every occurrence of that lemma across
every book you have loaded, with the verse. Tap a result to go there. Entirely on the device
— no connection needed.
Export
⋯ → Export saves the page as an
image, or prints it, which on an iPad gives you a PDF via Save to Files.
Outline
Section titles become numbered headings in
a Word document, with the verse range and your notes underneath — the diagram turned into a
sermon skeleton.
Where it saves
On a Mac, every export opens the
system save panel, so you choose the folder and the name — and it opens at the last folder
you used. Safari has no such panel, so on the iPad the file goes to Downloads and you move
it from Files.
Lexical
Tap a word
Lemma, full parsing, gloss, and a
link into Accordance.
Highlight lemma
Colours every occurrence in the
passage at once.
Undo
Undo
One history for everything — splits, joins,
indents, word moves, ink, boxes, arrows, section breaks and titles.
⌘Z, or the button in the header. ⇧⌘Z redoes.
Scope
Each passage has its own history, and it
starts fresh when you switch book or chapter.
Symbols
Where from
The pictorial symbols are from
game-icons.net, by
Lorc,
Delapouite,
Skoll,
Caro Asercion,
Viscious Speed,
sbed and thirty others, used under
CC BY 3.0.
The structural ones — contrast, repetition, therefore, and so on — were drawn
for Nous.
Above the word
One group works differently from
the rest. Points left, Points right, of and to/for are set
small and solid in the gap above the word rather than laid over it — an arrow
back to what a word governs, of over a genitive, to/for over a dative.
Everything else about them is the same: select words, tap the symbol, tap again to take
it off.
The library
Ninety-six are on the rail; the
other four thousand are behind ＋ Library at the foot of it. They live in a file
of their own — icons.json, beside the app — which is fetched the first time you
open the sheet and then kept, so do that once while you have a connection. A symbol you
pick is copied onto your rail and syncs like anything else.
Gestures
Apple Pencil
With the header toggle on, the
pencil always inks and a finger always moves.