Family Historian User Group

I've been having a play with FH7 and on the whole I like what I'm seeing. I now need to get to grips with a few of the new features, but I'm sure that won't take too long.

The new text and table formatting options are a very welcome addition, but it has brought a perennial question of mine back to the fore: What do I want to do about 'text from source' if there is an image of the original document attached as a media record?

Up to now, because the plain-text editior didn't really lend itself very well to transcribing more complicated documents, I've taken the view that if there's a media file attached it just wasn't worth the trouble to transcibe. The original document is right there to look at. The new rich-text editor could enable a much more legible transcription, however. So now I am debating whether to continue along the same path, or start adding 'text from source' as a matter of course in addition to the image file.

Generally I work digitally rather than on paper, and I don't tend to share gedcom files. That leans me toward the image-only option. However, I do give written reports to interested family members and upload without media to a working tree on Ancestry from time to time. That leans me toward a more complete approach. Accuracy is of course very important, but he information is never going to be published, so it doesn't need to be 'academically rigorous'. However, I do have at the back of my mind that I won't be doing this forever, and at some hopefully distant point it may be desireable for the information I have garnered over the years to be useful to someone in my wider family who wants to pick up the torch but who won''t have access to my computer.

So: expediency or completeness? Would the extra effort just be redundant & potentially error-prone redupilication or fail-safe and platform-neutral future proofing? What are your thoughts on this? What's your preferred approach?

Like you, I work digitally. I attach images (when available) to Sources but always include a complete or (for large documents of which only a little is relevant) a partial transciption in Text from Source. I publish my research on the web, WITHOUT the source images (because of the minefield of copyright and different Terms of Service that constrain what I'm allowed to publish) but WITH the Text from Source (my transcription, my copyright).

It doesn't answer your question, as there will be as many opinions as there are users on this forum, but one factor you have not mentioned is the ability to search for text. I generally transcribe major sources such as Parish Register, GRO Certificates and census entries even though I also store images, as this gives the ability to search for occurrences of particular text that I may not have captured specifically in a fact.

That doesn't change with rich text, but it does make the source look neater both on screen and when printed out in reports, particularly when used in conjunction with standard text templates. My own approach will be to make more use of rich text going forward once I upgrade, but probably not do much retrospective reworking of existing material (although plugins can help enormously with reworking if the text is already reasonably well structured).

I've always liked to include a transcript as well as attaching an image. If I'm looking through my family, looking for areas that need further research, etc. I can see the source text quickly and easily without having to open up the image, find the people of interest on the image, zoom/scroll and then perhaps struggle to read it. I will (of course! ) at this stage also mention that this is one the key things that Ancestral Sources does for you in terms of helping to generate that transcription (for the common sources used). The new version of AS has templates that include tables to make these more closely match the originals.

Whether rich text will export in GEDCOM to another product depends on the other product.
My Export Gedcom File plugin will adjust the rich text to match the product.
Many only accept plain text, some only recognise simple bold, italic, underscore formatting, and a few accept full rich text but in HTML format that my plugin inserts in the GEDCOM.

I have a huge number of sources from newspapers, both short announcements (BMD etc) and longer articles (Obituaries, Wedding reports, misc articles about events or activities involving relatives). I've manually transcribed most of these as text from source and many of the document images are either unavailable or don’t display legibly. It’s really useful to be able to be able to format the text to more closely match the layout of the newspaper article headlines and sub headings with bold and centre text etc.