* Short Form for Repeated Place Names

[Shiriki]

Hi

I have been endeavouring to modify Fact Types (with some degree of success) in an attempt to make reports (particularly narrative reports) more readable.
I should point out that I am currently using only the Place field (and totally disregarding the Address field) to identify locations for Facts.

At present my Places are configured into 8 parts (or columns)…

Part 1 – Building/Company Name
Part 2 - Number (of Building/House/Flat etc)
Part 3 – Road/Street
Part 4 - Village
Part 5 – Town
Part 6 – County
Part 7 – Post Code
Part 8 – Country

Only a few locations will have an entry in every part and family Historian now seems to ‘Tidy’ up and remove/suppress unused parts in reports following the more recent updates.
However, one issue which keeps on cropping up is the repetition of full Place names, which looks ungainly.
I note that once a Narrative Report is generated, it is possible to ‘tick’ the box ‘Use Short Form for Repeated Place Names, but this truncates the Place location to the part entry before the first comma……in my case Building Name/Company Name etc…….so is not much use.

Family Historian help states:

If checked, place names are only given in full the first time they are mentioned within each section. Thereafter only the first part of the place name is given. If this option is not checked, place names are always given in full.

What would be nice is to be able to choose what parts comprise the ‘Short Form for Repeated Place Names’…..e.g.

Place Part = 1,2,3,4 or perhaps…..

Place Part = 1,2,3,6

and in all cases to automatically strip out (‘Tidy’) empty spaces and redundant commas.

Hopefully I have explained what I am thinking about clearly enough.

Is this something that others would find beneficial and if so perhaps a 'Wish List' request?

Many Thanks in advance for any comments.

Shiriki

[tatewise]

Yes, particularly since the introduction of autogeocode mapping of Place fields, but not Address fields, there has been an understandable tendancy to put more column parts into the Place field. Although, that is not the only reason.

Whereas, the Short Form for Place option in Narrative Reports and the Place Format options in Diagrams are still based around the longstanding default of only 3 or 4 Place parts.

I agree with you that there should be Tools > Preferences > General settings for Short and Medium parts for Place similar to the settings for Date Formats, etc.

[AdrianBruce]

The issue that I can see, is that if you really want to use more sophisticated place name shortening (which would be very nice) then I am unlikely to find a shortening pattern that works across all countries.

My pattern for a usual place name in the USA has 2 nodes between the town and country, whereas the UK pattern has only one. Any shortening routine would need to be conditional to be useful to me. And given the number of countries at the colony level back before the formation of places like Australia, I get more than somewhat worried how to handle that....

[LornaCraig]

To avoid the problems Adrian has mentioned I have always tried to 'force' my Place names into just three parts: town/village, county/state, country. In some case this means I have to enter to more than one geographical designation into one of the columns but it does mean that the country is always in the third column.

It would be really useful to be able to omit the last part when producing a report or diagram in which all the places are in the same country (usually England) as the repetition of the country seems pointless and irritating in that context. However it would be even more useful if we could have two levels of shortening:

1. the option to omit the last part (country) throughout the report or diagram.
2. the option to use an even more shortened form for repeated Place names in reports.

The first would remove all occurrences of the country, which is sensible if the whole report is self-evidently about just one country. The second would enable a place to be shown to county/state level when it is first used and then omit the county/state when the place is later referred to, making the narrative flow more naturally .

[Shiriki]

I have been having further thoughts about this issue.

How about this for an idea (although I have no idea how complex this would be to code within Family Historian).

Open the Place List (Tools>Work with Data>Places) and in front of each Place you are presented with a ‘Tick Box’ to enable ‘Use Short Form Place’. If an entry has a ‘Tick’ against it then the Short Form of Place will be used as required within reports for repeated occurrences (within that section). If not ‘Ticked’ then any repeated entry is not shortened. Perhaps one could have a Select/Deselect all command so that you could enable this feature quickly then deselect those individual Places you didn't want truncated.
With my favoured idea of a user being able to choose which parts comprise the Short Form for Repeated Place names’, would this go some way to satisfying as many users as possible? Whether or not a user could choose between different versions of Short Form for a Place entry maybe asking too much, perhaps the 'Tick Box' idea could somehow be extended to show a choice of say a figure 1 or 2 via a drop down to decide which customised Short Form is used......?

Just a thought.

Shiriki

[tatewise]

That is an interesting thought, but it cannot be implemented purely in Tools > Work With Data > Places without also adjusting the Place records themselves, because that is where the Work With Data dialogue gets all its data.

Also consider the Diagram > Options > Text > Edit > Place Format options for Short and Medium that need a similar treatment.

If users have a mixture of column part arrangements for different countries or regions, then how many variants should be catered for?

My opinion is that for users with such a mixture, then no global solution such as a general Tools > Preferences settings would work satisfactorily, and to define Short and Medium column Part settings for every Place record would be too onerous.

[jimlad68]

yes, an oft repeated problem/ dilemma. These 'lengthy' posts (and many others) might give you some food for thought:
Best format of PLACe and ADDRess for Map Geocoding (11937)
PLACe, ADDRess structure, level use-Lat/ Long from TMG (11246)
Rearrange Address and Place Parts Plugin (12330)
Addresses - Suggestion for Best Practice (12965)

[tatewise]

Jim, I think those links are going off at a tangent. This thread is purely about how to manage Short and Medium abbreviated Place names in Reports and Diagrams, where currently only the first one, or first two, column parts are included, which is often unsatisfactory when there are more than three or four column parts in each Place name.

[jimlad68]

Ok mike, but I think some food for thought might help long term planing on this topic which can create all sorts of 'management' problems.