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 E-Sword Module Database Library

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by Missionary-Pastor David R. Cox (my ministry website)  
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David Cox's How to Use e-Sword Commentary Panel

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  How to use...? 

How to use e-Sword (4/07)
e-Sword Menu (03/08)
Bibles  (11/07)
Commentaries (03/08)
Dictionaries (03/08)
Study Notes (03/08)
Topics
Search all Tops (05/09)
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Program Panels Layout
Bible Searches
Search between Bibles
Making Verse Lists (4/07)
Strongs

e-Sword Utilities

MSWord Macros for s-Sword
esword MEd (11/07)
esword FIn (11/07)
esword RUn (no longer available)
Chads Commentary Creator
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   How to Create Modules 

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e-Sword MEd
My Word Macros
Creating Bible Modules Updated!
Creating Commentaries Mods Updated!
Creating Dictionary Mods Updated!
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Creating Devotional Mods New!
Creating Illustration Mods New!

 Overview  

Let's start off by saying that e-Sword has a very nice implementation of Bible use and study. For sake of explaining things, I will divide the e-Sword user interface into sections which I call "panels". This page will deal only with the Bible panel, the Bible Navigation panels, and the Commentary Panel. If you are not already familiar with e-Sword, open the program and the study the image below to familiarize yourself with the general panels and layout.

E-Sword has commentaries that are automatically linked to the current active Bible verse. You must download and install these commentaries, and then restart e-Sword before they will appear in the tabs in the Commentary Panel.

Special Note: Structure of an e-Sword Commentary

e-Sword commentaries have 1 entry for each verse in the Bible. Depending on who created a particular commentary, the commentary may or may not have a commentary on a particular verse. In addition to these verse notes, there is the possibility of a chapter and a book comment for each chapter and each book of the Bible. A little further ahead we will explain how to see these notes. The commentary notes are synchronized with the current active verse in the Bible.

Notice in the image at the right that I set the Bible panel to 2Cor 1:8, and automatically the commentary is reset to this same verse. If you want to unsychronize the Bible and Commentary link the small icon of a chain (links) with a red asterisk on the icon bar will disable or enable this sychronization.

Also notice that in the commentaries that I have installed on my system, that some have an "i" in a bubble and others do not (like Scofield, K&D Keil and Delitizch OT Commentary, etc.). Each time e-Sword resets the commentary panel to a new verse, it polls all the active commentaries and sees if there is a comment note in the commentary, and those that do get the "i" bubble noting that there is information on the verse in that commentary, and the rest don't get that icon on their commentary name.

Navigating the Bible Panel

First let's review how to get around in a Bible so we can see the verse notes in the commentary window. This we select with this navigation panel at left. It is a normal tree type menu structure where you click on a book of the Bible and it will open child entries, one for each chapter.

At this point you click on a chapter and the chapter will appear in the Bible Panel and you scroll down through the verses to get where you want to go.

Very Important: When you "go to someplace" in the Bible, you get there by clicking on the Scripture reference tree or by typing in the reference in the blank box at the top of the Bible Navigation Panel. This will only get you to a chapter. The chapter will appear in the Bible panel, verse one at the top (or the actual verse if you entered a reference in the goto reference box at the top).

From here the actual verse selected will always appear in a dark red color, and the rest of the verses in a light greenish blue color (see image at right). This is important because the Commentary panel is automatically set to seek the current verse in the Bible window. The current active verse (if there is one, because there doesn't have to be one) is always in dark red.

 Going to Book and Chapter Notes

Now to go to book notes for a book, simply click on the book in the Bible navigation panel. The Bible will "go to" that book. The commentary window should reset (if you have the sychronization link icon set) and the commentary panel should be updated. When you click on a book of the Bible in the Bible Navigation Tree, WITHOUT clicking on a corresponding chapter and verse in that chapter, the commentary is set to the chapter notes IF THERE EXISTS ANY FOR THAT CHAPTER in that commentary.

Likewise clicking on a chapter in the Bible Navigation Tree WITHOUT clicking on a verse in that chapter will reset the commentary panel to the current chapter of that book, and you can see these chapter notes.

Note: To Select a Particular Verse - Just click on the blueish green verse reference and it should turn dark red.

You can always tell what particular verse is current in the Bible panel by looking at the last line of the interface, and it will have the current active Bible verse, Dictionary word, and Commentary note.

 Changing Commentaries

To change commentaries, simply click on the tab of the commentary you want to see in the commentary panel. Note that only commentaries that you have in your e-Sword folder will appear in these tabs, and only those that are read at startup of the e-Sword program that time. Sometimes people create commentaries that are not correct, have programming errors, etc, and these will not be included.

Also note that you can manually exclude or include the commentaries that appear in these tabs. Go to main menu "Options" and then click on "Resources". In the three check box windows, the middle one will have all the commentaries that e-Sword has found, and you can manually check or remove the check from these boxes beside the commentary name, and you will see only the checked ones in your e-Sword when you click "OK" and return to e-Sword. At times you download a commentary just to see if you like it, and that is "bothersome" at times if you have a lot of commentaries. This is the place to make the commentary tabs more readable.

 Too Many Commentaries

If you have too many commentaries and it takes up too much real estate, you can also go to "Options" on the Main Menu, and then "Layout" on the submenu. Here on the far right, there is an option for "Tabs" and you can change it from the default "Multiple Rows" to "Single Row", and all the commentaries will appear in one single row with arrows to see more to the left or right. This will make it hard to see if the commentary has the "i" information bubble on a commentary, so I would not recommend it except if you really need this option.

 Using the Commentary Icons

Note: Here my version of e-Sword is 7.9.5, the most recent at this time. If some of your icons are not the same, check and make sure you are using the most recent version of e-Sword.

These are the icon menus for the Commentary Panel.

The first one is the Print Preview for printing a commentary note. See image at right for an example of this pop up window. This dialog box is seen in the image at right. 

From this window you can view the note as it will be printed.

The menu bar is as follows from the left: Close this window, print, change margins, Go to first page, go to preview page, drop down of all pages, go to next page, go to last page, resize in window to see 100%, fit width, whole page.

  Searching the Commentary.

At this time e-Sword does not have a feature to search across commentaries. But within a single commentary, you can do an exhaustive search. When you click the binocular icon , you should see the popup dialog box at right.

Notice that in this screen capture, the commentary is Clarke, and I searched on the phrase "son of God", and there were 138 verse, chapter, or book comments that this phrase was found in.

I selected Matthew 8:20, and scrolled to where it was automatically highlighted. I then placed the cursor over the verse reference Dan 7:13.

Within the commentary search window, the tooltip popups are still active, and the verse popped up with this verse. I had selected in the Bible panel, "KJV Red letter edition", so that is the version of the Bible I will see in the tooltip popup.

Like I said, this is not a search through all commentaries, but it will search one right nicely.

The controls are pretty much straightforward. You can search on all words you enter, any of the words, or a phrase, and to click "Search" will do the search and stay in the dialog box, to Accept will close the dialog box and take you to the highlighted Bible passage.

Cancel just closes the dialog window and returns you to where you were.

 Editing icons

These three are used for editing text within the commentary. The first icon is for selecting all the text in the current commentary note, the second one is for copying to the clipboard the selected text (if nothing is selected it is grayed out as in the image), and the third one copies to the active Study note (if it is not locked).

The Magnifying Glass icon is used for making the text of the commentary larger, which is very useful at times when dealing with Greek and Hebrew where the vowel pointing or subscripts are hard to read.

 Commentary Navigation icons

These icons are used for commentary navigation and synchronization. The first (chain links with an asterisk) is used to synch or unsynch the commentary panel to the Bible panel. The last two are icons used to flip through the commentary notes. The first one is to move back one commentary note, and the last one is to move forward one commentary note. At the beginning of a book, the back icon will not go to the previous book, but at the end of a book, the next will take you to the next book, chapter 1, verse 1.