* Help with custom Census Autotext format

[JP Ford]

Good Day,

I'm a new user of AS, but wondering if what I desire is possible. I've looked at the options for Census Autotext and they offer several possibilities for presenting the data as text. It seems, however, that the existing options all present the data in simple delimited format that lists all fields first, then the data. The default is commas separated, as in...

comma separated

(003).png (9.96 KiB) Viewed 2960 times

It is pretty ugly and even undecipherable in this raw format. Tab separated isn't much better. Similar data in an Ancestry.com census record is parsed to show only fields with data in them, ignoring the empty ones, as in...

ancestry format

(002).png (11.25 KiB) Viewed 2960 times

Is it possible to create a similar custom autotext format, (whether it excludes empty fields or not)???

Thanks!

[jbtapscott]

In essence, No!. I think the issue lies more with a lack of formatting within FH than anything else. I did try "playing" with the AS "Grid Column Separator" options, but really didn't get anything that was particularly readable. Fortunately (!?), I use GedSite for generating my website and this handles the AS grid functions perfectly.

Whether this issue may be addressed within FH7 I don't know!

[tatewise]

Unfortunately, your screenshots are not comparing like for like, and Ancestry isn't meeting the AS objective of a transcript mimicking the original Census record.
How would Ancestry represent the transcript for the two people Nancy and Etheldred Sorrell?

The {GRID} keyword is the only way to include the 2-dimension grid of columns x people as a transcript of the Census record grid.
The {TAB}| option is certainly better than comma-separated, and can be quite presentable in the FH Source record Text From Source and in Reports as explained in how_to:tabulate_multiline_text_in_records_and_reports|> Tabulate Multiline Text in Records and Reports.
Also, remember that AS is only creating a draft and must be manually edited to create a more accurate transcript.

If you use the FH Publish > Website feature then there is a Plugin that tidies up the HTML to produce tidy tables.

Things may change dramatically with FH V7 that is introducing word-processor style formatting, so grid tables should become much neater.

[JP Ford]

Thanks to you both. Wasn't considering multiple people at the moment as I was dealing with an older census, but I see the point. Ancestry can only represent one person in that manner, so...

Also, good to know that website generation can address this! I can live with it in that case!!