* What software to write a book.

[BakerJL75]

I'd like to write a book with end notes, not footnotes. I'd like to be able to edit and move the text around. No matter what software I look at, Word, Scrivener, etc it seems I'll have to manually renumber and reference my thousands of citations. I don't hate the reports in FH7, but I want to easily make paragraphs, perhaps combine sections (i.e. grab childhood events from wife and blend those in with the husband to they are in on chapter). In general, what software are folks using to write books? I like the PDF export option the best, but I don't want to pay for Acrobat to edit a PDF. Thanks for your thoughts and experiences.

[wagojo]

Hi

My go to would be Word or Scrivener, but if you're looking for a cheap(er) alternative to ACROBAT then I'd highly recommend PDF-xchange editor (from tracker-software). They use a one of payment method rather than subscription and you can try for free - it probably has most of the functionality of ACROBAT 10 (now unavailable and unsupported) without the current subscription model.

However, I don't think that will give you the functionality that you want - if you're running a relatively recent version of word, you can open a PDF in word to enable it to be edited - and that work's a treat (you may loses some formatting etc).

Another note (and this might be going too far for you) - if you're after a referencing platform that is a 'one-stop shop' that plays nicely with Word (and it means never having to re-type or format source citations 'once' they're added) I'd highly recommend ZOTERO (free) - but caution, it is really designed for academic referencing and may be way more than you require.

Cheers
Wayne

PS Donna Baker wrote a whole text on using ZOTERO for genealogy - it's very enlightening, but, in the end I decided against it and now that FH7 has the ability to create custom source templates I'm glad I didn't - this new feature gives me everything that I need (but ZOTERO is still a great product for what it's designed for).

[BakerJL75]

Thank you. I'll check into PDF-exchange. And I didn't realize newer versions of Word could edit a PDF. I have Donna Baker's Zotero book and considered it. But I'm very Evidence Explained oriented and getting the citations like I want them seemed like it might be a lot of work. On the other hand, maybe I should re-consider if EE is that important to me. I don't plan on publishing in journal or anywhere. Thank you.

[tatewise]

Regarding the position of Citation Footnotes, did you know FH Reports allow them to be end notes?
See the Report > Options > Sources tab, Location of Source Citations that offers 'At the end of the report'.

[BakerJL75]

I can't get that to work for a book.

Here is the report I'm using:

Screenshot 1.jpg (95.77 KiB) Viewed 1154 times

Here is the book setup:

Screenshot 2.jpg (86.27 KiB) Viewed 1154 times

But when the report is produced there are sources after Family of Roy..., Jean Virginia..., Billie...., etc. It puts it at the end of the report. I would love endnotes at the end of the book in a separate Endnote section. Duplicates combined, renumbered, etc. I'm not aware of any of the genealogy programs doing that though.

[tatewise]

Ok, firstly I was not sure you were talking about using an FH Published Book and secondly I did not realise that you were combining Family Group Sheet reports interleaved with other Individual reports.
You are correct that each report has its own Footnotes.
My suggestion only works if the Book contains just one type of report, e.g. a Family Group Sheet report for multiple families.
I am not aware of any word-processing products that will let you do what you request, especially the Citation Footnote renumbering you need for book end notes.

[BakerJL75]

Thanks. It would be asking a lot.

[AdrianBruce]

Jackie - it's a long time since I could make Word do this sort of thing, but I am sure that MS Word will take care of the numbering of footnotes / endnotes, because I'm fairly certain that I could paste footnoted stuff in, or cut it out and I didn't need to do any messing about with the numbers. They just automatically incremented or decremented.

However, it only works when you are using the proper styles and cross-referencing - it's the stuff on the References tab of the current MS Word. Which means that the big problem would be to convert the styles employed by FH into whatever the appropriate styles are in MS Word. In fact, it might be more than just the style, it might be that the conversion would need to also create the cross-referencing for footnotes.

And all that, to go earlier in the chain, would need the ?RTF? ?PDF? file produced by FH to be created with styles that identified the footnotes / end-notes. I think I remember being unimpressed by the styles that FH created in its reports. Sufficient to set formats but little else. And that's probably nothing alongside all the other issues about trying to get images in the right places in .RTF outputs from FH.

If there are any MS Word experts out there that can comment, I'd be interested - all this was from memory...

[davidf]

You could avoid the renumbering if your "book" endnotes were organised by "chapter" (where each chapter was a FH report). You might then be able to produce a Bibliography (avoiding duplicates etc) from the endnotes section of your book in something like Word or Libre Office.

This is a format I have seen in a number of Books - for Instance: Hodgkin, Alan, 1992, Chance & Design, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK)

[AdrianBruce]

...
And all that, to go earlier in the chain, would need the ?RTF? ?PDF? file produced by FH to be created with styles that identified the footnotes / end-notes. I think I remember being unimpressed by the styles that FH created in its reports. ...

Yes, I've tried a swift bit of experimentation and in the RTF output, almost everything, though definitely the footnotes, appears to be in "Normal" style. The Footnotes are in a table at the end. Basically this means that I can't see anything to identify the footnotes and their corresponding superscripts - nothing to distinguish them from an ordinary table at the end of the report. All perfectly useful for the purposes of saving a print - just not useful for going beyond.

As for the PDF, while I could get MS Word to convert it, it really wasn't happy about doing so - I had to give it the three-fingered salute to kick it into life. That was just as useless in defining any styles for the footnotes.

Both formats (RTF and PDF opened in Word) can have issues, especially where images are concerned.

Let me emphasise again that the lack of applied styles doesn't matter as far as normal printing is concerned - i.e. this is not an error by Calico Pie.

[BakerJL75]

Thanks all. Still playing around. I may end up just using word and copy and pasting.

[PatriciaGardener]

I use LaTeX to write my Family History. It is free, and very powerful, and I'm sure it would do everything you wanted. It is very good at referencing and automatically generating numbers. The only disadvantage is that it is not WYSIWYG - you have to build the .pdf output from your text and files you are including.

[mezentia]

LibreOffice is free and can do practically everything that MS Word can do, as well as including spreadsheet, drawing and presentation apps and for which there is copious amounts of documentation online.

I have had serious problems with Word for very long documents i.e. > 750 pages, with tables of contents, bibliographies, endnotes and index. There is within Word a Master Document feature that supposedly allows you to break down your document into individual chapters, but I have had endless problems getting this to work and it can destroy your documents. I believe the functionality has been deprecated in the latest version of Word, but have yet to check.

[AdrianBruce]

... There is within Word a Master Document feature that supposedly allows you to break down your document into individual chapters, but I have had endless problems getting this to work and it can destroy your documents. I believe the functionality has been deprecated in the latest version of Word, but have yet to check.

Interesting! Don't know about any deprecation but a very swift search brought this link:
https://addbalance.com/word/masterdocuments.htm

That refers to many other pages but perhaps especially this URL also
https://web.archive.org/web/20200808030 ... documents/

The author of the latter, a John Korchok, says, amongst other things:

... the deepest secret is that you create a Master Document to print the files, then you throw it away! Trying to preserve it by editing it is what creates the problems, so don’t try to preserve it. A Master Document is a temporary device used only at output time. Remember that and you will never have a problem. ...

Do not just read the above sentence - that is a suggestion that you should not despair, but only the first part. I suspect that there's a lot more advice out there from people with burnt fingers....