Tabula Overview

Tabula is a program designed to be used with Lingua Workstation and with the Nota Bene Biblical Texts. Tabula is used to build concordances, to create side-by-side parallel biblical texts, to retrieve selected portions of the biblical texts more easily, and to perform perform a wider variety of searches of the biblical texts.

Like the NB Biblical Texts, Tabula is sold as a separate add-on package. If you have Lingua Workstation, Tabula can be activated with an activation code that can be purchased by contacting Nota Bene. See Contact Nota Bene. Before using Tabula, the biblical texts that you plan to use must be installed and indexed. See NB Biblical Texts.

Concordances

When you purchase a printed concordance, you have a large volume with every word in the bible listed alphabetically and every occurrence of each word listed. Hypothetically you could build a concordance that is just like the huge printed volume. However, with an electronic concordance, it is not necessary to build the complete concordance. Rather, you will find that you can easily and quickly build the portion of the concordance that you need and use the small file that you build more efficiently. For example, if you want to look up the word "light," you would build a concordance for all words that begin with "light" (this includes lighted, lightening, lights, etc.). Tabula will save the results as a Nota Bene file with the extension .c01 in the folder that you specify (the suggested default folder is \nbwin\tabula).

For large concordances of more than about 150 pages, the results are automatically broken down into more than one file. Extensions are assigned automatically, using .c01 for the first file and .c02, .c03, .c04, etc. for subsequent files. The Concordance Toolbar can be used to move from one file to another within the same concordance.

You can create concordances that include only specified books in the bible by indexing only those books that you wish to include. For example, if you are studying the Pentateuch, you can use Orbis to create a textbase that includes only Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and then use Tabula to build concordances based on the Pentateuch textbase.

Tabula works only with words exactly as they appear in the text. Concordances must be built for all verb and noun forms separately (e.g., ran and run) unless all of the forms begin with the same letters (e.g., walks, walked and walking will be included in a concordance of words beginning with "walk").

You have many options for customizing the format of your concordances.

Parallel Texts and other enhancements

When Tabula is activated, options to Retrieve Biblical Texts and Retrieve Parallel Texts are added to the Retrieve menu on the main Orbis screen. You can retrieve up to 5 texts in parallel columns and insert them in a new Nota Bene file or in an open document. In addition, Orbis's capabilities are expanded for use with biblical texts by the addition of the Search Biblical Book option and two View/Copy options on the Retrieve menu and by the Chapter and Verse Display option on the View menu.