What do you do with your Highlights
When reading through a book and you make highlights, what do you do with them.
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I have a general highlight palette that auto-populates my highlighting into a specific notebook. Then, for books that I'm doing a deep dive into for whatever reason, I do a bit more. I'll make a book-specific palette and then two notebooks: One notebook is "Book Name Here Highlights," where the highlights go. The other will be "Book Name Here Notes," where any actual written notes I create in the book are kept.
So, all of my highlights are still there, stored within Logos. I've just begun to contain them, so there is just a little less chaos. I wish I had thought of doing this from the start, or at least sooner than I did.
Hope this helps.
Pastor, Mt. Leonard Baptist Church, SBC
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@Jonathan Bradley can you please share some of these with me as an example. I know you have the systematic year reading plan. have you made notes on that, that you could share with me to see what you are doing.
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Certainly!
Here is my highlighter palette for the Reformed SyS Theo reading plan.
After making a highlighter palette for a book, in this case, Reformed SyStematic Theology, volumes 1-4, you then right click on it, and you can set any uses of that highlighter palette to go to a specific notebook:
I made a separate notebook for highlights and actual notes because while I might have one or two actual notes per chapter, I might have dozens of highlights. When you have both highlights and notes in the same notebook and you want to scroll through your notes, there are massive gaps between your actual chapter notes because each individual highlight is a separate note. So, I decided recently to separate them.
And here is my notebook that my notes go into…..
Otheriwse, your notebook might look like this chaos:
As you can see, there are only two actual notes, and the rest are highlights. If I could scroll down on that screenshot, that's what it looks like when everything goes to one place.
Pastor, Mt. Leonard Baptist Church, SBC
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I hope that makes sense. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask!
Pastor, Mt. Leonard Baptist Church, SBC
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@Jonathan Bradley I found that all very helpful! Thank you.
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Thank you for explaining this. I have personally had a lot of confusion about highlights, and was asking about it here. If I am understanding correctly, you don't advocate for highlights to be in "no notebook" but rather keep them in their own notebook corresponding to each actual "notes" notebook. So for example, if I have a notebook on Luke, one notebook would be "Luke notes" the other is "Luke highlights." Is this correct? I can understand the importance of keeping them out of the notes notebook, but I am unsure why a separate highlight notebook is better than "no notebook." I truly don't understand the system, so any clarity is appreciated.
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Hi Kristin,
just a few remarks from the sideline here: The Logos system of notes and highlights is quite versatile and allows for different approaches how to go about using them. Many users adopted their way of working with it in the days of the old notes tool - that was based on the concept of notebooks - or even earlier (there was a time when notes and highlights were separate entities in the software) and have continued to use what was working for them - which is a great way to ensure that years of study don't go waste. On the other hand, in the current notes tool there is no actual need to use notebooks at all, and by faceted filtering you can choose to only see the notes or only the highlights or both, so there's no real need to separate them 'to avoid chaos'. I understand however that this makes much sense for some people, coming from their history with Logos. For somebody starting with Logos, it is surely helpful to see - but not necessarily everything needs to be done exactly this way.
That said, Jonathan's approach is very helpful. I would add two aspects that are quite relevant to me
- Highlighting is made much more convenient by the feature of assigning a keyboard character to a highlight. I use Y for the yellow highlighter, O for the orange one (which actually turns out a faded red on my system, so hitting YO will produce a bright orange, and I built myself a highlighter that is even more bright which I invoke with L and use mainly to highlight footnote references to make them really stand out, since we can't highlight footnotes except for in eBooks). You get the idea. I also use a green highlighter (G) to mark up resources referenced that I own and a grey one (Rrrrrr) for things I find dubious or disagree with. This is so intuitive and straightforrward, I sometimes catch myself hitting Y after selecting a text in the Kindle app/webreader and wondering why it's not highlighting.
- There is a real use case for notebooks even after what I said above: sharing with other people. This is really great. I have thousands of notes in my Logos not because I wrote them, but because other people put in the labor of love to make them and then made them available to all other users or a group of users where I'm part of. Since you are teaching, a shared notebook on the book you are studying could be of help to your students while you would not share your private notes.
Hope this helps a bit
Have joy in the Lord!
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Yes, that is exactly right. It helps with organization. Having the highlights in a notebook can be beneficial. For instance, let's say you want to, for some reason, get rid of all your highlights in a specific book, be it a book from the Bible or a book you've been reading. Also, in the past, filtering through highlights (which has changed some, so I haven't done this in a while, so it might be a moot point now) was easier with them in a notebook.
Pastor, Mt. Leonard Baptist Church, SBC
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@Jonathan Bradley my problem with highlights is, when I am doing a reading plan on the Gospels. The highlights on mobile does not have the function as going into the notebook assigned to. So for me that is making use of both platforms I find it very difficult and frustrating to find a solution that can be done and carried on both platforms desktop and mobile. I would really need some advice on how people approach this. The only way I could find is making use of clippings instead of highlighting. But now I came across the challenge of to organize/create the clippings.
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@Lukas that is a very good question, regarding highlighting on the mobile app and having it go to a specific notebook. I guess that is when the "no notebook" idea of highlights would be really feasible. For me, more than having two separate notebooks for a book is keeping the actual notes and then the "highlighter notes" separate; when they are all together, it is just entirely too chaotic for me.
However, I am going to make a post, referencing this one, about highlights on mobile going to specific notebooks.
Pastor, Mt. Leonard Baptist Church, SBC
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@Jonathan Bradley the option on mobile is go every time in settings and choose the notebook for the highlights. But my question is how do other people make use of the mobile app to carry on with there research when you dont have access to your desktop.
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@Lukas Here's a not-so-old discussion on Can we please separate notes and highlights. Maybe you can profit from this.
I shared some Highlighter Palettes and Dynamic Visual Filters here. Feel free to ask about it.
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… (there was a time when notes and highlights were separate entities in the software) and have continued to use what was working for them - which is a great way to ensure that years of study don't go waste. On the other hand, in the current notes tool there is no actual need to use notebooks at all, ….
Hi @NB.Mick, thanks for the explanation, and I think your point about how there are many was to do it is what has been causing confusion.
In my specific case 99% of what I am doing is notes, and they really need to be in independent notebooks. Then once in a blue moon I am highlighting something. So for example, in the entire chapter of Lk 1, I think I had only one highlighted word. So for the yellow highlight to be part of the Luke notebook didn't work since it would get in the way of notes, but to have it in it's own notebook seemed excessive too.
I then thought that maybe ALL highlights could all be in one notebook, but to do that they could just be in "no notebook" since that an be turned on or off.
The other issue is that when I am going though Luke and making notes, the system is defaulting to my Lk notebook. However, then when I make a highlight I can either stop what I am doing and move the highlight to no notebook or a different notebook, or just ignore it and then clean up the highlights out of notes later.Since to highlight a word and create a note are obviously two different things, it is disorienting that Logos perceives it as the same, and it has been unclear what the least disruptive way is.
@Lukas Here's a not-so-old discussion on Can we please separate notes and highlights. Maybe you can profit from this.
I shared some Highlighter Palettes and Dynamic Visual Filters here. Feel free to ask about it.
Hi @NichtnurBibelleser , thanks for the links, and it sounds like I am not missing anything, and apparently the options are for the highlights to clog my notebook, or stop what I am doing every time I want to highlight something and move that random highlight somewhere and continue.
It helps with organization. Having the highlights in a notebook can be beneficial. For instance, let's say you want to, for some reason, get rid of all your highlights in a specific book, be it a book from the Bible or a book you've been reading.
Hi @Jonathan Bradley ,
I think what I am having confusion about is why it would be needed for highlights to be in a notebook to turn them off. Doesn't just turning off "no notebook" do that?
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Kristin,
There used to be a way to turn off seeing certain notebooks in a book, so you could turn off viewing highlights and other note markers in order to have a fresh read through something without being swayed by your previous thoughts and highlights. I think it used to be in the visual filters before the recent upgrade/change to the toolbar (I could be wrong, however, it's been a while since I did anything like that.
Pastor, Mt. Leonard Baptist Church, SBC
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There used to be a way to turn off seeing certain notebooks in a book, so you could turn off viewing highlights and other note markers in order to have a fresh read through something without being swayed by your previous thoughts and highlights. I think it used to be in the visual filters before the recent upgrade/change to the toolbar (I could be wrong, however, it's been a while since I did anything like that.
Hi @Jonathan Bradley, ya, there for sure is a way to do it on the old version (which I guess is the non-subscriber version?) It is under visual filters, I think, here is a screenshot. So you are saying the new toolbar lacks this option? That would be a real oversight for them to forget to include this function.
Can someone confirm that turning specific highlights (notebooks) on or off is still possible on the new toolbar?
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Still there.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Yes, you can. It works much the same way (I am just figuring it out myself here as I was just looking). It's on the new toolbar under "Notes" and then "Show notes and highlights" menu on it.
Pastor, Mt. Leonard Baptist Church, SBC
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Thanks for the screenshot. If you don't mind, I actually have a question about your notebooks. :) How is one practically called "This Week's Sermon"? Are you literally creating notes and highlights then deleting them every Monday to create other notes and highlights for the notebook??
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No, I'm not deleting them. I generally create one note file that is a collection of all the info, quotes, thoughts, and ideas that I gather for that week's text for the sermon. Then, in the same note, I give it some organization, usually a bare bones outline. From that outline, I then create a sermon document, and fill out the outline as I go. I'll make a link to the sermon document and paste it into the Sermon Note file for the corresponding sermon.
Then, after I have preached the sermon and am ready to start on the next passage, I drag the note from "01a. This Week's Sermon" to "01b. Bible Notes".
This is 100% not my system; I copied it from someone I watched host a webinar months ago on how he does all his sermon preparation within Logos. I like it and how it works.
Pastor, Mt. Leonard Baptist Church, SBC
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Thanks for the explanation. That was helpful. Would you happen to have that video you just mentioned? I would be interested in seeing if you have it on hand, but if you would need to hunt it down don't worry about it.
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I don't have access to it any more. It was through Logos Daily. Hey @Jason Stone (Logos), do you know if the Sermon Prep Webinar from Logos Daily is still around somewhere? It was from some time last year, I think, and it was with a pastgor who did all his sermon prep within Logos Bible Software, with notebooks named "This Week's Sermon" and "Bible Notes".
Pastor, Mt. Leonard Baptist Church, SBC
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