Family Historian User Group

This question may be less relevant when (if) FH7 eventually arrives.

I have been doing quite a lot of research recently on a branch of my family that emigrated to the USA. As a consequence I've been transcribing a lot of US census entries. Even on dual monitors, getting all the columns to line up is quite a difficult task and results in lines of text that when printed onto A4 portrait wrap 2, 3 or sometimes 4 times. My question is how do others cope with extremely lone lines of text?

My initial thought is that I cut and paste the text from Ancestral Sources into a simple editor (Notepad ++ for example) and then save the output as a .txt file. Then, I import this into Excel as a tab separated file, and split the lines into three or four "chunks", cutting and pasting each chunk one below the other in such a way as each line now comfortably sits within the page margins. I then select the text and export it as a new .txt file ready to import and replace the text generated by AS. The only problem I forsee with this is that the tab settings in FH and AS are fixed width, therefore the original .txt file will need to be edited to replace multiple tab characters with a single tab before importing into Excel. Clearly this is a tedious process, but at the moment I can't think of any other solution.

Unless someone here knows otherwise

There is some related advice in how_to:tabulate_multiline_text_in_records_and_reports|> Tabulate Multiline Text in Records and Reports that you may find useful, but does not solve the very wide table problem.

As explained in that article, if you have chosen the AS setting for a Tab separator, there will only be one Tab per column, unless you have manually edited the Auto-text / Text From Source. The Tab characters take no account of Tab width settings in either AS or FH. So that multiple Tab problem should not exist.

With all the questions on the US Census, one option is to turn the table around for the extra information and have a "set" of data for each line.

So have the fields which occur for everyone across and the fields which are only completed once for each household in a separate list below.

Another alternative is to transpose the table so the column headings (of which there are too many to fit width wise) go down the page and the names (of which there are probably sufficiently few to fit the page width) go across the page.

If you have a spreadsheet most have the ability to copy a well behaved table and paste & transpose it into another area (usually under Paste Special).

Some may grumble that that does not represent a "faithful transcription"; in which case just add a note to say it has been transposed!