Contents

Overview

Opening a New Volume

Closing a Volume

Displaying Passages

Searching for Verses

Entering a Range


Overview

The Alexandria Library of Religion is intended for the student of religion. It provides a common search and display mechanism for  major religious texts.

Alex allows multiple volumes to be loaded simultaneously. Each volume can be searched, or selected portions displayed. The text can then be printed, saved to disk or copied to the Windows clipboard for pasting into other documents.


Display a Passage

Select the range that you want to have displayed.

Move the cursor in the display box to the position where you want the text to appear, and click on the Insert button.

Note: The amount of text that can fit in the display box is limited. If you get a Out of memory error message, it means that the range is too large. Try to select a smaller range, or write the range to a disk file.


Search a Passage

Select a range for the search.

Click the Search button. You will be prompted for a list of words to search for. Multiple words can be combined using the / sign for or and the + sign for and. Use the square brackets [ and ] to denote a phrase. Upper or lower case is not significant.

Click the OK button to start the search. All verses that match the given search criteria will be displayed in the display box when the search is complete.

Examples

Find all verses that contain the words Matthew as well as Peter:

Matthew + Peter

Find all verses that contain either Matthew or Peter:

Matthew / Peter

Find all verses that contain the phrase Word of God:

[word of god]

Note: As with the Display Passage procedure, the search procedure can overflow the display box if too many verses are found. Try to limit the range or the search criteria if this happens.


Enter Range
Setting a Range

Before you can insert a block of text, or search for keywords, you need to set a range. A range consists of a start and end reference.

The range can be set by using either the Range Builder, or by typing a range into the Range field.

Using the Range Builder

Click on the Range Builder button at the right of the range text box. Select the start and end books from the list boxes, and type in the chapter and verse numbers (or click on the spin controls to increase or decrease the numbers displayed). Click on the OK button to make the range active.

Using the Range field

You can set a range by typing directly into the Range field. A range consists of a start and end reference in the form

Book Chapter:Verse - Book Chapter:Verse

It is not always necessary to include all the elements of the reference. Only the starting book name is required. If any of the other elements are omitted, the range is built according to the following rules

If the start verse is not specified, assume first verse of start chapter

If the start chapter is not specified, assume first chapter of start book

If the end verse is not specified, assume last verse of end chapter

If the end chapter is not specified, assume last chapter of end book

If the end book is not specified, assume same as start book

You need not specify the entire book name, provided that the number of characters given is enough to uniquely identify the book. (For example, using MAT for Matthew will work - MA will not, because Mark will also match the name.)

Books of the same name will be preceded by a roman numeral without a space, for example IJohn, IIJohn, IIIJohn, etc.


Open Volume
Open a New Volume

Select Open Volume from the File menu. Supply a file name to the File Open dialog box, or select from the list of volumes. Multiple volumes can be open simultaneously. The Window menu will display a list of all open volumes, with a check mark next to the current volume.


Close Volume
Closing a Volume

Select Close from the File menu, or press the F4 key while holding down the Ctrl key.


Write Range
Writing a Range to Disk

If the text that you need to display will not fit into the display box, you can use the Write Range option of the Range menu to save the text directly to a disk file.