Continental Commentaries and Context of Scripture - unable to highlight or search within textual not

Hi all.

I just made a substantial upgrade to my Logos to include the Hermeneia, Continental Commentaries and Context of Scripture - especially to use on my two Android devices. To my disbelief, I find that the format of the text is not consistent over my 2 devices and that textual notes either appear as a popup, or as part of the text and cannot be highlighted, searched, etc. This is a big problem. Additionally, it likes to display the text at the bottom of many pages in my preferred Bible format, which is not necessary at all when the commentary is already doing this.

I use a tablet (Asus Transformer) running Android 4.4.2 and a phone (Samsung S3) running 4.3. For example, when going to the "Text" section of Westermann's CC on Genesis 1-11, if you have the print version it will first list the translation in full (say, Genesis 1:1- 2:4a), followed by the textual notes for the verses. This is fine and the phone version does this to a limited degree: it lists the translation in full, but the textual notes are popups that one cannot highlight, do word-searches or studies on, etc. The tablet version is not much better as it completely breaks with the print version's structure: it will give v. 1 followed immediately by the textual note as part of the main text. Again, the textual note - even though it is now part of the main text - is not able to interacted with in any way. Once the textual notes are done for that particular verse, the next verse is presented. This has the unfortunate side-effect of completely breaking up the translation into little snippets.

In addition, it randomly inserts the passage from my preferred translation. For example, the format for the CC of Westermann has each major section starting with the passage range and subject titles ("Genesis 1:2-2:4a, Creation of the World"), followed by "Literature" (which lists bibliography), and then "Text" (which includes the translation, and then textual notes). In the tablet version, where it has "Creation of the World" - in lieu of having a later full translation as provided by the commentator, it chooses my preferred Bible and prints that out instead! Then follows "Literature", but at the bottom of the first page of "Literature" are more verses from the preferred Bible with a note that says "Only first 15 verses of range shown". 2 pages later, since Westermann splits up his bibliography for each section into several smaller sections for various passages, Logos decides to start listing verses from the preferred Bible again at the bottom of the page. This is all very annoying and redundant, and makes the commentary kind of unusable. The phone version does not do this insertion of verses anywhere - it simply does what I mentioned above.

For the Context of Scripture - the same problem with textual notes is found: cannot interact with them in any way on the tablet. I have not even bothered to try it on my phone, as I assume it will be the same as with the Continental Commentary.

So... is this normal? Because if it is, I'm afraid they are not as useful as I thought they would be, and I would be better served with my current print editions. I wanted the Logos version to be able to interact with the text as with other resources. I cannot speak for the merits of the PC version, as I rarely use that. I prefer to study books in a bookish format, with my tablet doing duty as a make-sort book. The phone is for word-studies when out and about to pass the time. Does anyone else have these resources and experience with them?

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Harp Sitardo

As and addition to my previous post, I just checked the PC version and it does follow the phone format with having the translation of Westermann presented with the textual notes as popups. All verse popups are to my preferred Bible, though it would probably make more sense to display the actual translation of the commentary!

DMB

Harp ... you're playing our music!

Too often I use Kindle just to be able to interact with the notes in a normal fashion. Even when Logos puts the notes at the bottom you still can't highlight them or add key notes. Though the resource notes DO show up in searches by the way.

I notice in WBC the notes are printed (along with popups) but in Contenental they're not. I don't have the hardcopy to see if Contenental put their notes as 'distant' notes that Logos would treat as popups only (since not literally embedded in the text).

Then there's the verse popup quotes that have nothing to do with the translated text being discussed in the commentary. That's been discussed at length on the forum.

Harp Sitardo

Thanks for confirming some of this for me. It is very... aggravating.

In a hardcopy of Continental Commentary, the translation is presented and then the textual notes to the translation follow after the entirety of the translation (not sure if this is what you mean by "distant"). These textual notes (quite copious and of a nature where one would want to use Logos' ability to word-search, lookup, highlight, etc.) cannot be interacted with in any way. Add to that the insertion of passage from one's preferred Bible at the bottom of the page every single time a passage is reference in the textual notes or commentary, and it makes for much redundant and useless information.

There are times where there is literally ONE line of commentary, and the rest of the page is preferred Bible passages that are spanning over multiple pages!

I really do not understand this at all. I would post some screenshots, but I don't think I can upload them from my device and I really don't feel like going through the pain of uploading them to some photo-sharing site.

Harp Sitardo

Forgot to mention the last point - you say the redundant verse quotes have been discussed. And they haven't been fixed? Do you have a link to the discussion?

DMB

It sounds like, on the issue of Contenental commentary notes, that it's not consistent with WBC, etc in Logos. That said, however, there was a period before Logos4 when publishers would do their own Libronix resources (which includes Contenental and the older Hermeneia I think; don't know). If so, Logos is usually reticent to re-start a whole series. This whole paragraph is a guess.

But it's a super-pain for you; I know in WBC I 'read' the textual notes just like commentary text (quite often first, before the commentary's translation).

I couldn't remember how to find the earlier discussions on tagging commentary verse references to use the either a translation the commentary is using, or more difficult, the actually translation in the commentary. The discussion has waffled around a lot.

Harp Sitardo

You may be correct about not updating the commentary.

I have found something that has a major effect on the view: whether the resource has been downloaded to the device or not. If the resource is online, then the entire translation is displayed correctly, and the textual notes are accessible via the hyper-links in the translation. This produces popups which are still unable to be interacted with. When the resource has been downloaded to the device, then I see the situation where the textual notes are displayed as part of the main body of text (after each verse), are unable to be interacted with, and the preferred Bible passages are interspersed throughout. This makes absolutely no sense to me.

The whole issue with the passages being displayed is kind of odd, apart from displaying the translation initially using it. In the body of the commentary, every singe time a v. is mentioned, it will then display that verse using the preferred Bible. So if the commentary has 7 passages (even of 30 verses) it cites, Logos will take up almost the entire page citing them in-text using the preferred Bible. I have examples of where one page has literally one single line from the commentary, and the rest are just passages. This - to my mind - is kind of silly, since you can have another Bible open in the lower panel, and you can just touch the v. to get a popup. It literally makes no sense.

Anyways, it seems as if the technology has been badly implemented in these instances, or whoever designed the interfaces really didn't use commentaries personally heh heh! As it is, I think its not a simple setting on my end that needs changed, but just the way they are. For the price, I am a bit surprised that they are actually quite a pain to use, and the benefits do not outweigh the cons - in my opinion. At least Logos will let me return them, I hope. That's a lot of money.