Family Historian User Group

I started out with TMG and I made full use of the formatting capabilities provided. In 2013-2014 I needed to make a switch and at that time I chose Rootsmagic. I spent a considerable amount of time changing all the features provided in TMG that were no longer supported by any vendor that I saw at that time. Now I find myself at a crossroads again and I am working to get my data cleanly and functionally transferred to FamilyHistorian 7. In that endeavor I have run into the following situation that I am attempting to correct.

I am using shared facts with various roles in each fact. Supported by all the major products for 25+ years.

Some of my sentence templates or structures have run into limits imposed by FH. A sentence structure cannot exceed about 1000 characters. That may be variable or the characters are counted differently. Subject for a later question.

One of my sentence structures works out to be about 1600 characters. FH truncates that so my sentences and roles are not properly created.

I have come up with a workaround. I create two facts, part 1 and part 2. The first fact has about 800 characters of the sentence. I have eliminated the use of a note for part 1 which creates a break in my output. The second part has the remaining part of the sentences for the roles and this part does contain the note. I use both parts as a pair. This approach currently works but I am concerned that I am pushing FH to the limit on this and I may regret this decision later on if FH changes their program that somehow disables or disrupts what I have created.

Is there a better way to do this?

Over the years, especially since the introduction of more and more complex expressions, occasionally such arbitrary text length limits have been revealed and usually the limit gets removed in a subsequent program update fairly quickly.
In programming terms, it is usually a matter of allowing for variable length text instead of fixed length text items.

I reported the problem to Calico Pie as Fact Sentence Template Truncation #868640 in May 2020.
My notes say it was fixed in the FH V7.0.0.4 beta.
I have just now created a Sentence Template of over 4,000 characters, closed FH, reopened FH, and it still all there.

Are you saying that it has not in fact been fixed in the released FH V7.0?

Mike,

What I am seeing is the text or sentence is not being truncated as I create the sentence but it appears that certainly in the narrative report it seems to ignore anything past about 1000 characters.

I created a sentence structure that was just over 1000 and I put just plain text as the very last. The plain text never showed but if I took out some of the sentence in the middle and shortened the whole thing to say 900 characters the text appeared ok.

One thing I did notice but have not done extensive testing is that when using the long sentence structure the sentence appears to be correct if I look at it in the person detail screen and select that particular fact. In the above cited incident the text appeared ok.

I will try a much longer sentence and see if it is being truncated on everything or just in the narrative report. I will be so much happier if the length restriction no longer exists.

Ok, so that is a different problem.
The Sentence Template itself in Tools > Fact Types is never being truncated when FH is opened & closed.
It is always rendered correctly in the Facts tab Sentence box.

BUT the sentence is truncated when rendered in any Narrative Report.

If the above analysis is correct then that new symptom in Narrative Reports must be reported to Calico Pie as usual.
Hopefully, that will get fixed soon and you won't need any exotic workarounds, which seem horrible to me.