Family Historian User Group

So I’ve spent the day working with Version 6 and in terms of reports I am just as frustrated as before, if not more frustrated. Yes, being able to add newlines and paragraphs to Fact Type sentences is a minor upgrade. By why did Calico not try and do something similar to the “Notes” ? I will try and explain what I mean,

I use Notes a lot to record detailed information about an event or attribute. In FH Reports these “Notes” just merge in with the rest of the text/sentences making it very untidy and can lead to huge paragraphs all running one sentence after another. It is especially tiresome at the end of a Note as the next Event/Attribute sentence just carries on immediately after the Note. For example (a simple example) :

Fred Smith experienced Military Service between 1941 and 1946. He …… this is a note which may be quite a long paragraph which ends …. Discharged from Class G Reserve. Fred Married Freda Smith …

The Marriage sentence follows directly after the previous note. There is no method of being able to do the following by adding line breaks or new paras to the start or end of the Note.

Fred Smith experienced Military Service between 1941 and 1946. He …… a note is entered here which may be quite a long paragraph which ends …. Discharged from Class G Reserve.

Fred Married Freda Smith …

And yes, I could have added a <br> or <para> to the automated Marriage sentence, but that is cumbersome at best as you are altering the next fact sentence instead of formatting the Note, if you follow what I mean. And you can’t just put a carriage return or two at the end of the Note as FH strips them out during the report generation.

Or am I missing something ?

I find that The Complete Genealogical Reporter is superb at producing reports. I've been using it ever since I began using Family Historian in 2009 as it bullet points facts/events. FTM produced attractive reports when I was using it 5+ years ago although the rest of the software was lacking.

Ian, I have no problem adding line breaks/paragraphs with Notes.

Firstly, any newline/space/tab layout characters are retained in Note fields in the GEDCOM. I agree the report writer collapses them if you use the Report Option to Inc. Event/Attr Notes, but you can include them in Sentence Templates using {note} and the layout is retained.

Secondly, adding something like the following to the end of the Sentence Template works well:
<. {note}<br>>
The fullstop is needed to end the previous part of the sentence.
You can put <br> or <para> where you like inside the outer chevrons or just rely on the layout characters in the Note field. There are many variations on this theme.

One snag has arisen with <br> or <para> at the end of Templates. The source index superscripts are postioned incorrectly, but that should be a fairly easy bug fix in FH. The same problem afflicts a trailing {note} that has a trailing newline in the Note field.

The alternative is to add <br> or <para> to the start of EVERY Template.
But a snag has arisen with this option where Date Periods/Ranges that should have an initial capital, because they start a sentence, do not!

Many thanks for the reply and the suggestions Mike

I like the output formats of TCGR and I actually do not mind if the Notes are separate from the main facts, in fact I think it looks and reads better that way, the main facts first followed by all the additional notes, personal preference I suppose. But it would be nice to have it all in one package and was hoping that version 6 of FH would have built in "better" report building options, 3rd party or otherwise.

Anyway, I'll have a play around and I still have TCGR to fall back on.

You can do that Ian. It just depends which Notes you are talking about.

To me the Fact local Notes supplement the Fact and would look oddly out of context after the main section of all the Facts.

On the other hand, record Notes (on Main tab of Property Box) do come after the main Report section when enabled in Report Options > Main > Record Notes. What's more they retain all the newline/space/tab layout characters as you wanted.