* Where within source, symbols and text length

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Famquick
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Where within source, symbols and text length

Post by Famquick »

Hello

I have Family Historian 6.2

I was wondering if it's bad in any way to have a long text with = and / such as this

Kirkebog = Koebenhavn / Sokkelund / Timotheus sogn / Kirkeboeger / Kirkebog 1940 - 1945 Timotheus / Opslag Nr.XX - Foedte Maend

is bad in any way, to write in the "where within source" box?

Like with corrupting the data in the gedcom file or something? Making it so the information will break if you move/export your gedcom file elsewhere or something?
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ColeValleyGirl
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Re: Where within source, symbols and text length

Post by ColeValleyGirl »

That's no problem within FH and should export OK as long as the programme you're exporting to understands the character set you're using.

FH defaults to UTF-16, but UTF-8 is more common elsewhere and you can configure FH to use that instead (Menu Tools > Preferences > File Load/Save and tick the box that says Save in UTF-8 file format.

There is a length limit on some fileds -- if the field has a ... button so you can bring up a popup window, it's effectively unlimited, but otherwise 255 characters is the limit (if I remember rightly) or possibly slightly less. So Where within source is limited but Text from Source isn't.
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tatewise
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Re: Where within source, symbols and text length

Post by tatewise »

You specifically mention = and / characters, which are definitely no problem at all.
All the standard symbols found on a UK/US keyboard should also pose no problem.

However, some extended characters such as accented letters may not be fully supported by other genealogy products.
GEDCOM offers the character set encodings UNICODE (UTF-16) and UTF-8 that are supported by FH and allow any of the thousands of foreign characters to be represented. That includes Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, most Asian languages, etc, etc. However, some genealogy products only support the much more restricted ANSI character set.

So whatever you use will NOT corrupt a GEDCOM file, and will NOT break information if you move/export your GEDCOM file elsewhere, except that any extended characters not available in ANSI will not be displayed correctly by some products.
Mike Tate ~ researching the Tate and Scott family history ~ tatewise ancestry
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