The CNTR collation takes the texts of various witnesses to the New Testament and aligns them to each other according to a scheme optimized to display the minimum number of columns. The CNTR collation provides several improvements not normally found in other collations:

• Displays orthographical differences, scribal corrections, and the condition of characters.
• Provides the first English interlinear including the variant words so that the average user can get an idea of what they mean.
• Aligned by semantical words based on differences in lexeme, part of speech, and morphological sense.
• Highlights variant patterns based on algorithmic determined variant boundaries.
• Generated directly from the raw transcription data to help eliminate errors.

The collation currently only contains extant manuscript data from up to 400 AD along with some modern critical texts. The collation was originally computer-generated using three different algorithms and new witnesses are added using an alignment algorithm. If a manuscript contains different book or verse orders, the text is aligned to the traditional canonical order.

The variant patterns shown at the bottom are determined by objective criteria unrelated to scribal motive and may not always be intuitively obvious. These variant patterns are then combined on the basis of dependency to form larger variant units displayed in the apparatus. Such patterns are not necessarily caused by the processes implied by their names and the order of the layers shown does not imply that is the order in which the variants occurred.