* Text Formatting In FH6?

[BobWard]

I was really hoping that the new release would support text formatting like WORD. In reading the release notes, I do not see any mention of text formatting. Did I miss something, or, is text formatting still going to require exporting my database to an RTF file in WORD?

[Jane]

There is now the ability to add newlines and paragraphs into Fact Type sentences, but I am afraid no bold, italics at the moment.

[mezentia]

I hope "at the moment" at least indicates that rich text formatting is on the cards.

It is a real drain on time and resources to have to re-apply formatting constantly to web output to get it to look attractive on the page, and to apply even the simplest of formatting to guide the reader through large slabs of text. Stuff that needs to be presented in table format is a particular issue.

[tatewise]

It sounds like you are talking about Narrative Report format.

As Jane said, the Fact Sentence Templates now allow Formatting Codes for New Line and New Paragraph, and fully support Data Refs and Functions that allow much more sophisticated sentence structure.
That will avoid the 'large slabs of text'.

The Improve Website or CD DVD HTML Plugin has a tidy tabulated column feature, but is temporarily being updated for FH V6.

[BobWard]

I need text formatting for all the notes and biographies that I have written for individuals. As it stands now, I will have to export my database into WORD and go though 1500 people to set all the bold, italics, font changes, color, etc. that I want for each profile. It would have been so much easier to have done this within FH when the info was originally entered.

Text formatting would seem to be a basic and easily introduced capability, but it must be more complicated than I think to not be incorporated into FH.

[PeterR]

I guess that at least part of the complication is to be able to export 100% compliant GEDCOM.

[tatewise]

The solution to that Peter is to use a markup language such as HTML, BBCode, or Wiki Markup that we are familiar with using in these Forums and in the KB.

[jimlad68]

When I used TMG I exported reports to *.rtf files. I created sentences (templates) with special combinations of characters. I then only needed a fairly simple Word Macro (experiment with simple record macro feature to what you need, e.g change styles, para format, font, colour) to run on any future reports.

[mezentia]

The solution to that Peter is to use a markup language such as HTML, BBCode, or Wiki Markup that we are familiar with using in these Forums and in the KB.

I'm sorry Mike, but that's a real cop-out. I don't see why anyone should need to get to grips with the complexities of HTML or any other abstruse method of representing text whilst using a modern PC application. Why can't we just cut and paste from Word, or a web page, or use bog standard text formatting? FH6 is supposed to be a 21st Century application! I had more text formatting facilities on my old ICL PC running Windows 3. When all is said and done, I am a family historian and chronicler, not an HTML geek, and frankly, even if I did want to get to grips with HTML, life's too short. Whilst FH does a terrific job of recording my family history, it still doesn't help with the second most important bit, and that's being able to present the research in an attractive and readable manner without hour upon hour of re-formatting page after page of boilerplate text.

I'll still be upgrading to V6, though, when our dear friends at the Royal Mail get around to delivering it

[tatewise]

I did not mean to imply that users had to work in those codes, but that they are Gedcom compatible, because they use plain text to define text formatting.
FH could have a format toolbar just as in these postings but display formatted text as in word-processor.

BTW: If you ordered a download directly from Calico Pie you would not have to wait for the post.

[NickWalker]

Text formatting for me has been my number one wish list item for nearly 10 years. I would have happily sacrificed all the new features in versions 5 and 6 to have had it. I did vow to myself that I'd stop using Family Historian if version 5 didn't include it but here we are a few years later and I'm using version 6. Very frustrated but I can't see a better alternative product currently.

I can't tell you the number of emails over the years I've had criticising Ancestral Sources for producing badly formatted census source text and me having to explain that there isn't anything I can do about it.

Nick

[BobWard]

Mezentia - I sympathize with what you are saying. My objective in doing all this genealogy research and saving all the information into an organized database was to produce a written book for all my family members, present and future.

The data & media organization in FH is great, but it is going to take me untold hours of editing in WORD to get all the text looking presentable for publication in a book. Very frustrating. The last time I checked the RTF import of my database, it was over 2,600 pages. Not looking forward to all the text editing that will have to be done, that could have much more easily been done in FH with the original entries.

However, I don't know if other popular genealogy software includes text formatting or not. I will have to do some checking and see. Although, at this late date, it would be major pain to export all my data to another program and probably lose all my links to over 1500 files of multimedia data. My fault for not more thoroughly evaluating other programs before committing to FH.

[tatewise]

Might the new Sentence Template features help reduce that Word editing task?

[BobWard]

Mike, I don't use templates. All the text I am trying to format is text that I create for the multitude of biographies & notes that I have written for each person. My book will be published as a series of Individual Summary Reports for each person in my database.

I looked at some of the other automatically generated report formats and found that they produced too many grammar errors and unstructured text with no paragraph indents at logical places, etc. Granted, I could have been more disciplined in entering data in a format that would probably improve the computer generated narratives, but my objective was to assemble a basic database and then personally do all the writing to bring that information to life via biographies and notes.

The Individual Summary Report seems to best eliminate/minimize grammar structure issues and best accommodates all the free text that I enter for each person's profile. My reports read more like they have been written by a person rather than a computer. Hence, the need for text formatting to provide a professional look.

[tatewise]

Bob, I entirely understand your technique and the reasons why.
However, the new Sentence Template features, amalgamated with your existing Notes, in a Narrative Report may be worth a look.
You could for example borrow some of the ordered style of a Summary Report but in a more narrative format, and I think the new features can probably fix the grammar errors, structure the text, and insert paragraph indents at logical places.

[IanTS]

For me this is a great disappointment, especially as the request for better report formatting has been near the top of the “wants list” for some time (was No.3). I can now only point everyone to, and thorough recommend, “The Complete Genealogy Reporter” (shortened to TCGR), and yes, it costs money, albeit not that much.

In fact the really sad situation as far as reporting is concerned within Family Historian is that they could have approached TCGR, or another GEDCOM reporting tool developer, and incorporated it into Family Historian without much development work (as they do with the PDF creator tool). I would have gladly paid a little more for this. One of Family Historian’s rivals already does this and bundles a version of TCGR within their program.

For those not familiar with TCGR it is not only an automated GEDCOM reporting tool but creates wonderful family tree drawings within the report all at the touch of a few buttons. The resultant reports are readable, very readable, unlike the now rather out of date Family Historian Reporting. You can download a trial version for a play, and if you do you will realise how backward and old fashioned Family Historian Reporting has become.

For me this new version 6 does not give much, for example one of the big new features, Automatic Internet Data Matching, is the last thing I would want to do. I do not know how many times I have looked at others trees (including Professional Genealogists) only to find glaring errors that then perpetuate to other trees. Why would I want to do that automatically?

Anyway I digress, to sum up, very disappointed about the reporting, especially when, with a little bit of though, it could have been so much better with little development, as in license and bundle in third party software that’s already out there.

PS. I have no connection in any way with TCGR apart from being a user.

[tatewise]

Are there any special needs for TCGR that could be incorporated into the Export Gedcom File Plugin?

[AdrianBruce]

I tried TCGR two years ago after many recommendations here and was deeply shocked to find the notes for events and attributes were printed only after all the basic sentences of date, place, , etc had been all printed. Total disconnection. Total illegibility. Clearly if you don't use notes or regard them as no more than footnotes then your mileage may vary!

So far as I can see some of the subsidiary items on request 3 have been done.

The major omissions are concerned with text formatting such as bold, italic, etc. Here I suspect the issue is compatibility with GEDCOM and recipient programs. While you could mark up your text in FH it looks a bit poor when the recipient program prints the markup as if it were ordinary text for printing. Which, according to GEDCOM it is.

[tatewise]

True, but that is where Plugins come in. It would be very easy for my Export Gedcom File Plugin to strip out those text markups when not required.

[NickWalker]

The major omissions are concerned with text formatting such as bold, italic, etc. Here I suspect the issue is compatibility with GEDCOM and recipient programs. While you could mark up your text in FH it looks a bit poor when the recipient program prints the markup as if it were ordinary text for printing. Which, according to GEDCOM it is.

One option would be that as soon as some formatting (bold, italic, tables, etc) is added to a note/source this could be recorded as a separate Family Historian tag with a non-formatted version of the same text retained in the standard Gedcom tags when the file is saved. When loading in a file, if FH spotted its own note tag it would use that and ignore the standard tag.

An alternative of course would be to have an option when exporting to strip-out the formatting.

[jmurphy]

I agree with the writer of this blog post, who says: Plain text is your friend when moving your writing from one app to another.: Why Scrivener is every indie author’s very best friend

I agree that for displaying information from census returns and the like, having table formatting is useful. However, we can't cram every feature in the known universe into Family Historian. I do not want to see "formatting like Word" incorporated into FH. If you want formatting like Word, send your text over to Word.

Yes, those of you who want your website to spring fully-formed from FH like Athena from the head of Zeus are going to be unhappy with me for saying this, but I am tired of seeing posts all over the net which are filled with extra text characters because the authors wrote their post on a Mac with fancy open / close quotes. Whatever additions are made to FH should, IMHO, be made with inter-operability in mind. If they are, then other programmers like our own tatewise can come along and help out with the look of the presentation.

One of the programs I use in addition to Family Historian is Louis Kessler's Behold. http://www.beholdgenealogy.com/

Behold reads a standard GEDCOM file and produces all sorts of reports from it. I use it to cross-check my FH files; it gives me a quick and easy way to produce a human-readable file which I can skim to look for gross data entry errors, like having people linked to the wrong parents.

If you look at the screenshot on the main page, you can see Behold's "Everything Report". He has a nicely-formatted report from a plain GEDCOM that doesn't require the user to put any markup langauge in the GEDCOM itself. Louis says the report:

... can be exported to rich-text format and loaded into your word processor. It can be exported to html and put on your website. In each case, the output looks just like it does in Behold.

A free trial is available, and currently Louis offers $40 for a lifetime license. He plans in the future to also have editing in Behold, so if you see a mistake, you can edit the file from there.

My point is -- what do we actually NEED to have within Family Historian itself, and what can easily be supplied by add-ons, plug-ins, or other utilities?

If we want really detailed table formatting for things like census returns, perhaps formatting in a text note is not the best answer. It might be more efficient to have FH link to a separate file, in the same way it links to a media file.

[jimlad68]

Interesting discussion which just goes to show that it is difficult for one program to do everything, and that is why many genealogists use more than one program and hence the importance of portability of data (yes a strong virtue of FH). When I was on TMG, as good as it was I used 2 other programs regularly including the old FTM (v16 I think) which although relatively basic had a simple but effective "everyone tree" which was never incorporated in TMG. For me the main aspect is to have a main genealogy program that is easy and quick to enter and manipulate data.

[NickWalker]

I agree that for displaying information from census returns and the like, having table formatting is useful. However, we can't cram every feature in the known universe into Family Historian. I do not want to see "formatting like Word" incorporated into FH. If you want formatting like Word, send your text over to Word.
...
If we want really detailed table formatting for things like census returns, perhaps formatting in a text note is not the best answer. It might be more efficient to have FH link to a separate file, in the same way it links to a media file.

I don't really care how a future Family Historian solves this problem. But currently if I want to transcribe a census record and have it presented in a report then it looks a complete mess because FH is incapable of dealing with columns. I've been using HTML now for over 20 years, and that can happily deal with tables, bold, underline, italics so we're hardly talking about advanced features! HTML is just plain text (as is RTF) with some control codes in - which GEDCOM itself is anyway! To export to another program it would be easy enough to strip those codes out or have them converted to whatever format that other program uses. I don't see that this is any different to the issues of having other software deal with the way that Family Historian links to multimedia, or includes Place records or map co-ordinates, etc.

[BobWard]

A problem that I notice in creating a FH RTF file is that it really messes up page breaks and photo locations/sizes on the various pages when I open the file in WORD. Creates a ton of work to fix everything.

It would just be so much easier to do all the formatting in FH and generate a finished report right from FH.

[RBH425]

Thank you Bob Ward, I agree completely and have contacted Calico to express this wish for export/print to Word. I have about 13,000 individuals in my file and just published a book using the TMG output to Word. The book is about 900 pages. I did need to do some editing of spacing, pictures layout, but very minor edits compared to rtf output.
Very frustrating. I can understand how some people want rtf. It would be great if Calico would offer both options.
I'm not sure I can commit to FH at this time, without output to Word.