Trying to learn Visual Filters; need help

I'm trying to figure out this Visual Filter thing, so I thought I'd start by trying to simply mark the days of creation. I'm not doing very well... Not only can't I make it work in Hebrew, I can't even make it work in English or Swedish!

How do I:

Mark the words "the x day"?
Mark the whole phrase "And there was evening and there was morning, the x day"?
Do the same two things in Hebrew?

I've named the filter, chosen All Bible Text in Gen 1-2 in [appropriate Bible], and selected a highlighting style, but after that not one single thing has worked, except that I managed to mark the single word yom for a while. Though how on earth I did that, I have no idea about, since now I can't even make the equivalents 'day' and 'dag' work, much less the Hebrew...

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steve clark

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Mark Barnes

I presume the difficulty you're having is finding the right search syntax (Visual Filter is basically just a semi-permanent search). So in this case, it might be best to get your search right first, the create the filter from the search (choose "Make Filter" from the link just under the search tab). Searching for "the x day" could be be done in the following ways:

"the * day" - is easiest, but is painfully slow.
the BEFORE 2 WORDS day works, but has false positives - it will also match the phrase "the day"
the BEFORE 2 WORDS day ANDNOT "the day" works, although it would exclude verses that include both the phrase "the x day" and "the day" in them - though there aren't any in Genesis.
the BEFORE 1 WORD (first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh) BEFORE 1 WORD day works perfectly

As for the second request, that's now straightforward:

"And there was evening and there was morning, the" BEFORE 1 WORD (first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth,
seventh) BEFORE 1 WORD day

As for the Hebrew, this will only work with the Hebrew text, not a reverse interlinear, but the visual filter is:

"וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם שֵׁנִֽי׃"

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/188218#Comment_188218

the BEFORE 2 WORDS ANDNOT "the day" works, although it would exclude verses that include both the phrase "the x day" and "the day" in them - though there aren't any in Genesis.

There is a missing word in the above query, but note that the BEFORE 2-2 WORD day overcomes the problems of the BEFORE 2 WORDS day ANDNOT "the day" ==> see 5. Proximity Filters at http://wiki.logos.com/Search_HELP

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/188253#Comment_188253

There is a missing word in the above query,

Thanks

the BEFORE 2-2 WORD day

Thanks even more. I'd somehow missed that syntax.

fgh

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/188218#Comment_188218

I finally found some time to get back to this.

Thanks a lot, all of you, but I'm afraid I can't make any of these work all that well.

the BEFORE 2 WORDS day works, but has false positives - it will also match the phrase "the day"
the BEFORE 2 WORDS day ANDNOT "the day" works, although it would exclude verses that include both the phrase "the x day" and "the day" in them - though there aren't any in Genesis.

These two, and Dave's version, mark 'the' and 'day', but not the number in between.

"the * day" - is easiest, but is painfully slow.

You could say that again! Just when I started, Time Machine decided that that would be a great time to not only do the hourly update, but also reindex my entire external harddrive. Yeah... Took about half an hour to get two searches done...

The words finally get marked all right, and I can create a filter, but the filter takes so long to show up that I took for granted it hadn't worked (and was about to post and say so). (I guess that's what happened before the first post as well, when I actually did try this one.)

It also works better in Swedish than in English: in English it marks [God called] 'the light "day"' as well. But I guess that can be fixed with ANDNOT.

the BEFORE 1 WORD (first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh) BEFORE 1 WORD day works perfectly

...

"And there was evening and there was morning, the" BEFORE 1 WORD (first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth,
seventh) BEFORE 1 WORD day

Work, but aren't all that funny to write out when you're working in 4 languages... And, obviously, not even the English translations use the exact same words.

Also, you have to change the colour of the text itself; if you use underlining or a highlighter it will break off before and after the number.

"וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם שֵׁנִֽי׃"

Works, but obviously only for the second day. And with a * you're back to the "painfully slow".

In Swedish I ended up with the following three-line filter for now:

"Och det blev afton, och det blev morgon, den * dagen."
"den * dagen"
"* dagen" ANDNOT "den dagen."

This works perfectly to mark all references to a particular day in Gen 1-2, but it takes an incredibly long time to show up. Doing a similar search in a longer text and all 4 languages I work with would be virtually impossible. (Correction: this worked perfectly yesterday; today, when I clicked it off and then on again under the filter icon, it gives a slightly different, and not correct, result. The very same filter!)

Is there a way to write the faster filters such that all words are marked continuously, and not separately?
Is there a way to change the ridiculously long formula "(first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh)" into something with an @?
Is there a way to make a filter like this show up in different translations and languages, without having to rewrite it for each of them separately?

(I guess I'm choosing the very worst time to post this; everyone now being busy on the new website... (As I will be in a moment).)

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/188718#Comment_188718

Is there a way to change the ridiculously long formula "(first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh)" into something with an @?

You could use the BEFORE 1 WORD @NCO BEFORE 1 WORD day for the OT

The best NT equivalent I can come up with would be: the BEFORE 1 WORD <LouwNida ~ 60> BEFORE 1 WORD day

fgh

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/188725#Comment_188725

Mark

I got caught up with other things, so I never tried out this suggestion until today, and therefore never got back to you with a thanks. Sorry! It works, but only with certain Bibles, none of which I regularly use, unfortunately. It works with NRSV, but not with NRSVCE, NAB or any Swedish Bible. I guess they're not tagged the right way.

No, wait a moment! It doesn't catch "the first day". Why on earth not?

Rosie Perera

You've spent a lot of time over this already. If you're really just limiting your study to those phrases as they appear in the first chapter of Genesis, it would probably be faster to skim visually through Gen 1 and manually highlight all occurrences of "the x day" or "And there was evening and there was morning, the x day." You can use sympathetic highlighting to see the corresponding Hebrew text highlighted, as long as you've done the highlighting in an English Bible with reverse interlinear.

fgh

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/193407#Comment_193407

You're quite right! The main purpose, though, wasn't the highlighting itself, but learning to use visual filters, and I've learnt quite a few things in the process... [:)]

(And as for interlinears, the Bibles I use don't have them. [:(] )

Kevin Becker

If you are doing something as limited in scope as the x day you might want to do

"the *rd day"
"the *th day"
"the *st day"
"the *nd day"

These process a lot faster that "the * day"

If you are interested in syntax searching to find things like this here is an earlier thread I participated in on yom with a numeral http://community.logos.com/forums/t/21385.aspx

fgh

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/193430#Comment_193430

Thanks a lot, Kevin!

With five different combinations of last two letters in Swedish it's hardly worth writing it precisely like that (you might as well write out the whole words and get a faster search), but I tried "den *a dagen" OR "den *e dagen", which actually finished in about a third of the time of "den * dagen". I couldn't imagine something that simple could make that much difference! And it seems like a more complicated search, not a simpler one...

I also tried creating a Passage List out of the results and then researching just that Passage List, but it only cut off about 5 seconds, so it's not worth it. 109 seconds is still slow, but it's an awful lot better than 330 or more. And I've got an almost 2GB large swap file right now, so a restart might speed things up a bit further. (EDIT: 57s after restart.)

The link looks interesting, but I haven't had time to look at syntax searches yet, so I'll put it in my syntax bookmark folder and read it later on. I have yet to learn a few more basic things first.

(Hey, Rosie, look how much I'm learning through this! [;)] )