* Formatting bug in report sources section?

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wellera
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Formatting bug in report sources section?

Post by wellera »

Hi

I've been meaning to raise this for a while, as I've seen this formatting problem in previous versions.

Narrative reports (eg Ancestors): In the section which shows source images, I'm finding that the heading for an image and the actual image can get separated onto different pages.

This happens at the bottom of a page with several images, where FH simply puts the heading for the next image straight after the previous image. BUT it does not check if there is enough room on the page to fit the image under it's heading on the same page.

Possibly easier to see on the attached screenshot of a report.

The only thing I have customised is to make the images larger than default.

Is this a bug that needs correcting, or am I missing something?

Regards

Andrew
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PDF report page with heading problem.jpg
PDF report page with heading problem.jpg (122.57 KiB) Viewed 3859 times
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AdrianBruce
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Re: Formatting bug in report sources section?

Post by AdrianBruce »

... it does not check if there is enough room on the page to fit the image under its heading on the same page. ...
Having just been messing about with something similar in Word I thought I'd add my thoughts...

It's not trivial in Word to keep one element with the next - or rather, it's trivial providing you know how to do it. I am uncertain if FH's word-processing ability has the ability to keep-with-next - it would need someone with a deeper understanding of RTF files to say one way or the other.

I've just been trying it and I can't see any way of doing keep-with-next in FH. Bear in mind that the citation isn't a heading for the image, it's a citation so there's no obvious way to connect the text with the image. So I don't think this is bug, it's just a limitation of the ordering of the items, which just get packed into the report one after the other. I'm not sure that FH even knows where the page breaks are - it can generate them but in the middle of text? I'm not sure it knows, it may just rely on the word-processing ability of RTF files....

If you wanted to keep the things together, I think this is a case for editting it afterwards in a word-processor such as MS Word - but even there keeping images matched up with text is liable to cause hair loss! Text to text - yes. Text to image? Yuk.
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tatewise
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Re: Formatting bug in report sources section?

Post by tatewise »

This is a recurring issue and there is no easy solution.
Hopefully the FH V7 new features may improve matters.
Mike Tate ~ researching the Tate and Scott family history ~ tatewise ancestry
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wellera
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Re: Formatting bug in report sources section?

Post by wellera »

Hi Mike

Many thanks for the heads up. It would be great if FH report page break formatting is fixed in V7.

If it's not in the current list of fixes for V7 (assuming you will have sight of this?), how does this get raised as a problem needing to be fixed in a future release?

Regards

Andrew
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tatewise
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Re: Formatting bug in report sources section?

Post by tatewise »

I suggest you use the Calico Pie problem reporting ticket service.
See how_to:about#problem_reporting|> Problem Reporting.
Mike Tate ~ researching the Tate and Scott family history ~ tatewise ancestry
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AdrianBruce
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Re: Formatting bug in report sources section?

Post by AdrianBruce »

I would be careful how you phrase such a request. My suspicion is that FH does not decide which page the heading and the image go on - it's the independent .RTF handling routine that does that. Therefore saying that FH doesn't "check if there is enough room on the page to fit the image under its heading on the same page" might not get very far because there's no functionality in FH that does anything close to that (maybe!)

What might be better is to phrase it along the lines of asking whether the citation text / heading can be kept with the following source-picture image so that they appear on the same page in the resulting .RTF document. The required command in MS Word is the Line & Page Break / Pagination / Keep With Next option but whether there is an easy .RTF equivalent, I don't know. I only know that using that on the text in the .RTF file in Word gives the required (and sensible) result.
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tatewise
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Re: Formatting bug in report sources section?

Post by tatewise »

I don't think RTF (nor for that matter PDF) have any involvement here.
FH is in charge of what is displayed on the Report screen.
FH then translates that into RTF or PDF format when Save Report As is chosen.

However, I agree that the problem report should talking in terms of keeping the Source Citation text & image together on the same page.
Mike Tate ~ researching the Tate and Scott family history ~ tatewise ancestry
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wellera
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Re: Formatting bug in report sources section?

Post by wellera »

Thanks Mike & Adrian for your input.

I've raised ticket #328562 and hopefully, regardless for how FH handles report processing, the developers can have a look at it and decide what is possible and it's prioritisation.

I know is always useful to have some understanding of potential challenges in working out a fix. BUT when I worked on projects in a former work-life, my IT colleagues were always insistent that I always just stated the problem when reporting a defect, rather than trying to shape/word the defect report around assumed functionality in the system.

Let's see what the developers can do.

Regards and thanks again

Andrew
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