In his Pastor’s Study post yesterday, Pastor Levi Durfey explained how he likes to print his passage out in English and Greek so he can mark up the text the old fashioned way—using pen and paper. He does this by exporting the text and formatting it the way he likes in Pages, but you can also do this directly from Accordance. The trick is to be aware of all the options available to you in the Print Settings dialog.

Here’s another look at the way Pastor Durfey formats his “observation worksheet”:

Accordance Sermon Prep 1

As you can see, he has the text double-spaced so he can write between lines. He devotes about two-thirds of the page to English and the other third to Greek. The Greek text appears to be in a slightly smaller font size. Finally, he has broken up various clauses and sentences by inserting line-breaks and tabs in the text. With the exception of this breaking up of the text, all of these things can be achieved directly from within Accordance.

To open the Print Settings dialog, select Print Settings… from the File menu.

PrintSettings1

This dialog box lets you set margins, the amount of space between panes, the amount of space between lines, and other options. If you print a window with multiple panes, you have a number of options for how those panes get translated from the screen to paper.

To approximate Pastor Durfey’s worksheet, I set up a search window with panes for the KJV and the Greek New Testament. I resized the KJV pane so that it took up two-thirds of the width, and set the font size of the Greek to be smaller than the English. I set the text to display each verse on a separate line, which is as much as I can automatically break up the text.

PrintSettings2

By default, Accordance will ignore the width of the window and fit the text to the width of the printed page. It’s even intelligent enough to preserve the relative widths of each pane:

PrintSettings3

The Print Settings also gives you the option to print the text at a standard print size, so if, like me, you use a larger font size on screen than you want on the printed page, you can specify that you want everything you print from Accordance to print at a specific size. I chose not to use that option in this case because I’m mimicking Pastor Durfey’s different font sizes for English and Greek. If you choose to print text at its on screen font sizes, you may have to experiment until you find the look you want. Using the Print Preview option in the Print dialog box lets you do this without wasting paper.

By familiarizing yourself with the powerful options in the Print Settings dialog box, you’ll find that, in most cases, you can quickly print out the material you need without having to go through another program. It’s perfect for those who still like working with pen and paper.