* Truncation of witness sentence

[AdrianBruce]

One of my back-burner jobs is a family in Co. Tipperary whose parish records went up in smoke in 1922. I am attempting to use the property records from the Registry of Deeds (images available on FamilySearch and partially indexed elsewhere) to see if I can stick things together. In this case, the deed names the grantor and grantee as uncle and nephew. I want to record the actual land transferred in some detail because virtually all the land-holders are called "George Jackson", which itself is a fairly common name, so I want to use the property to identify that it's "my" lot and not another George. And me being me, I was rather hoping to write the property details out just once to appear against both uncle and nephew.

To that end, I have a custom event "LandAcq" ("land acquired") where the principal is the grantee (the one who gets the grant of land) and the grantor (the one who grants the land away) is a witness with the role Grantor.

Sentence template for the principal's fact is:

Code: Select all

<para><{date} >{individual} acquired land< {place}>< from {role=Grantor}>.

Witness sentence template is

Code: Select all

<para>{individual} transferred land< {place}> to {principal}< {date}>. {%FACT.NOTE2[1]%}

Note that the purpose of the {%FACT.NOTE2[1]%} is to ensure that the text of the note against the principal's event, which contains the description of the properties, will also appear against the "witness fact" of the grantor. Unfortunately, it's not working properly.

When I'm in the individual property box of the grantor witness, I can see the full Note in the expected place - but that happens anyway. The Sentence for the fact (visible below the note), however, suggests trouble ahead as it is truncated after a couple of lines with "..." and the narrative report confirms this truncation, as seen in this screen-shot:

TruncatedWitnessSentence1.JPG (73.18 KiB) Viewed 2671 times

There should be a lot more text after the "..."

I can't see any parameter that I'm missing. I tried adding a death fact to the witness after the witness fact, just to see whether it might set things right but I still get the truncation. Can anyone point out where I'm going wrong? Or is this a Calico Pie support issue?

Thanks

[tatewise]

Maybe you have not noticed, but that truncation of long text with ellipsis is standard FH behaviour in some displays such as Queries, but not Diagrams and Reports, except it seems for some Sentence Templates.

See how_to:display_long_text_like_notes|> Display long text such as Notes for explanation and workaround.
BUT in your particular case the standard {note} code works just fine in place of {%FACT.NOTE2[1]%} and no workaround is needed.

[AdrianBruce]

Thanks hugely Mike. I'm sure that I've seen the ellipsis truncation in the odd query that I've constructed - probably to check up on my notes for some reason. It makes perfect sense there - who'd want to see a full note in a query? I certainly didn't need or want to. (Especially considering the length of notes that I have).

However, I don't ever remember seeing it in reports and am intrigued by the "some" in your "except it seems for some Sentence Templates"!

Yes, {note} works fine (d'uh! - slaps own head). In fact you would not believe (or maybe you would) the complexities that I was going round it trying to access that note - all the examples that I found, seemed to be suggesting that I needed to "navigate" to the principle and then? Then? Eventually I found {%FACT.NOTE2[1]%} worked - and in my exploratory work, I just used a short note, so it did work.

This made sense to me when I checked the GEDCOM and confirmed that all the witness stuff was indeed part of the principle's event, so there was no need to do any fancy "navigation" to access stuff about that event. (Only later did I wonder whether {note} might suffice but by that time I'd found {%FACT.NOTE2[1]%} worked, so no problem. I thought...)

Again, thanks for that.

[tatewise]

You have misread my first sentence that says it does NOT happen in Diagrams and Reports (except in certain circumstances).
You have discovered one example in Sentence Templates by using {%FACT.NOTE2[1]%}.
Another example is to use the option to Add Main Section Items with an Expression such as %INDI.NOTE2[1]%.

The general rule is that if you use a Data Reference involving NOTE2 then it gets truncated with an ellipsis.
Whereas, if you use any built-in features to show Notes or the {note} code or enclose the Data Reference within a function such as =GetParagraph(...) then it is NOT truncated.
However, in Diagram Text Schemes even a Data Reference involving NOTE2 is NOT truncated.

Ideally, the NOTE2 tag should have a couple of qualifiers such as :SHORT and :LONG to govern whether it is truncated or not.
Oh, the subtle vagaries of FH.