* Marriage Text witnesses not being included in Text from Source

[ChrisRead]

AS 7.1.2 64-bit
Marriage Entry
Auto Text: Rich Text Parish Registers 1754-1812 (England/Wales)

It's a few weeks since I last did any marriage entries, and haven't seen this before (probably v7.0.11).
I have just had a couple of instances where the "Solemnized between us" bride/groom names and the "In the Presence of" witnesses were showing in the text window (Auto, then tweaked other text) but after save and re-loading in FH7 those names were all missing in the Text from Source. The manual edits and format changes were still present and the bride/groom names were present in the marriage entry preamble (groom of this parish etc.).

Second time I copied the text box before save in case it happened again, which it did, but at least I could paste it in the Text from Source.

[ChrisRead]

Quick update, the witnesses are being correctly added as witnesses against the Marriage fact, so it's something to do with the Text to Source data copy.

[NickWalker]

If you're able to take a screen shot showing them in the source text in AS immediately before you press Save and then another showing them missing in FH following the save in AS then please can you send them to me? I've not come across any errors so far that would lead to that happening.

Thanks

Nick

[ChrisRead]

I've just done one where I didn't make any changes to the auto text before saving, and it went through as it should do. I've backed out the changes and done it again to capture what you asked and the problem occurred as reported before.

Shots attached,

[NickWalker]

Thanks, that's interesting - can you try using something other than a curly bracket and see if that makes a difference.

[ChrisRead]

I will do next chance I get, but I have used the same auto text template before in this same way for a number(~20) of marriages and not had an issue. So I believed.......

Although as I type this, I realise I went through a horrible exercise over Christmas period (3 weeks effort) of updating sources to use Text from Source rather than external Word files after AS7/FH7 came out, as it's much easier if my transcriptions are held in the records rather than as external files. I was simply copying from one source to another in most cases having created a reasonable initial one. So I may simply never met the problem before as I was copy/paste/editing rather than going through the whole AS route unnecessarily. I'd simply erased the pain from my brain.

The { are proceeded by a tab character btw, not spaces.

[NickWalker]

Hi Chris

Thanks for reporting this. I can confirm there are some issues with rich text with some characters ({ } \ and tab). This should be fixed in the next version.

Best wishes

Nick

[ChrisRead]

Yeah, I had a quick google and Wiki search on RichText and figured the { might be a bit of an issue as it's used by RT and if not handled correctly could muck things up.

[NickWalker]

I was well aware of it, and there was code there to deal with them right from the start, but at some point in the development cycle when adding support for all the other features this handling got broken. The whole Rich text to FH Gedcom translation (and vice versa) is quite complex.

[ChrisRead]

Not a problem, inter-format conversion is always a pain, particularly when special language characters are involved.

A quick question around the same subject: Is there an overview of auto-text templates, as the Template Keywords and Functions help page lists some Rich Text Keywords and Functions, but there is no real explanation of creating tables and use of | <row> etc.
I wanted a table with differing columns in different rows (such as a current birth/death certificate), but couldn't see how to do it from the information available. It may be beyond what AS auto-text can do, but FH can handle the RT in principal as I created something in Word, which copied to FH rich text Ok, at least as far as the table layout (line colour didn't get retained though).

I have hunted around FH and AS help, and the Knowledge base, but not found anything (I may have missed it though).

[NickWalker]

That's quite interesting because tables in FH can't have different column widths on each row. Actually FH is recording it as 3 separate tables without spacing between them. That ought to be possible for AS too: I'll take a look at that.

All the work I did on the AS rich text was based on the FH help page on FTF. In FH go to Tools->Plugins->More->How to write plugins and then look for FTF Syntax in the index (easy to find! ).

[ChrisRead]

Ah, yes, one of those traditional easy to find bits of information in an obvious location.

Thanks for all your continuing efforts.

[ChrisRead]

I actually came across the fact tables 'looked' like they joined together a few weeks ago. I accidentally deleted all the lines between two different shaped tables, and saw they now looked like one. They had different columns and one was wider than the other. I simply undid it as it wasn't what I was trying to do.

I didn't appreciate the significance and implications at the time, but with a bit of work in the RT editor you could construct a table of different columns in different rows using this approach. Personally, I'd use Word to make it and copy/paste the result in as it would be easier. Saving a blank in a FH Note record, and copy pasting the RT when needed.

Now the trick is to do the same in an AS template so there's no manual stage.

[NickWalker]

Hi Chris

I did some work looking at this last night and AS isn't doing this correctly. I'd not really appreciated the fact that the different rows of a table might have different column widths and hadn't realised that FH handled that by creating multiple tables. So currently AS mishandles it. Its not straightforward to solve (converting back and to from RTF to FH format is tricky) but I will do so and I'll probably send you a version to try out when I have.

Cheers

Nick

[ChrisRead]

The whole conversion thing sounds like a pain, but I'll help out with testing as suggested when you've had a chance to delve.

I've attached the sort of thing that's possible by the manual route. I was playing with a recent birth cert as I only have a few and had a rather messy Text from Source. I know people say 'why try and reproduce the original image' but sometimes it's just nice to have something clear and readable in a familiar form. What FH does not support is styling of the table lines as in Word they are red, but not in FH.

[ChrisRead]

I just discovered a gotcha if you try and build variable tables in the RT Editor, not sure what extent. I tried to insert a row at the top of the table, and it disappeared the rest of the table except the row I was inserting above.

I think the RT handler gets confused or mishandling the multiple tables. It probably means if you create one, don't try and modify the table within FH better to use something like Word externally to create a variant of your base vari-table.

Just another little bit of rear-end pain software developers 'love' so much.

[NickWalker]

I think the RT handler gets confused or mishandling the multiple tables

Yes that's what I was referring to in my answer earlier. I need to fix that before you can do what you're aiming to do with these templates. But I'd hope it won't take me too many days to do that.

Regarding your birth certificate design. Yes I can imagine that would be possible once I've sorted out the issue in AS. To make the template be usable for lots of people you would use the RTF-TITLE/HEAD/NORMAL tags and the RTF-WIDTH tags rather than hard-coding colours or column widths so that the template would adapt to the preferences of the users. This does make the templates a little more complex to set up but would certainly be required for it be distributed with AS.

[ChrisRead]

I realised that it would be nice to give back to the community once this is done. Is there a 'proper' way to export the Rich Text as the FH tag format, as I just went and looked in the GEDCOM to find it, and it seemed to be in that form, albeit prefixed with GEDCOM keywords. Not beyond the wit of man to extract and convert to a template, if there's no other way.

The 1953- birth cert I did was just a more complex one I tried as an experiment (do the worse first and everything else seems easier). What I was originally looking at was making a table based version of the 1754-1812 & 1812-1832 marriage entries, using the table as a means of laying it out more like those sort register entries. Those would be a lot simpler and probably more practical to do for AS auto-text as a first-off.

[Jane]

Get the note displayed in the note pane of the property box (not the note window). Hold down CTRL-ALT and double click.

[NickWalker]

Get the note displayed in the note pane of the property box (not the note window). Hold down CTRL-ALT and double click.

OMG Jane. The amount of time this would have saved me over the last 8 months! I assume it's documented somewhere but I never saw it!

[ChrisRead]

I literally just found the Save as Autotext under the cog menu on the editor, and came back here to say, problem solved. It seems that there is a keyboard shortcut for that too, from what Jane says. although I'm not sure where or how Jane's suggestion works, as I can't make it happen.

We all live and learn.

[NickWalker]

“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

[ChrisRead]

Ah! a man of culture I see.

'always know where one's towel is'

[ColeValleyGirl]

I have some sympathy, Nick. I found it by accident and it was like the light going on in the basement.

Scared the leopard something rotten. It turned into a kitten and still runs and hides at the mention of Family Historian.

[Jane]

This field

2021-02-05_151314.jpg (162.36 KiB) Viewed 5051 times

or any equivalent field in the property box.