* Census conversion - thank you! Other sources on to do list?

[Valjean]

I've just come back from another break from the hobby to discover the latest fantastic additional to Ancestral Sources thank you. The ability to move old plain text generic sources to the new ones in FH v7 is brilliant! I had previously started to do them manually but it was a real chore. I'm glad I took the break.

I had also started to convert births and marriages. Are these also on your presumably long to do list please? I'm asking so that if they are, even if they are not imminent, I will wait.... I realise that the plain text data is captured rather differently.

I've been using your program back since it was called gedcom census around 2006 I think (and it only did censuses if I recall correctly, the other boxes were greyed out) and have donated three times. Maybe it is time to donate again.

Paul

[klm2OUMK]

Yes, I agree, that yet again, thanks to Nick's hard work, we now have a very useful Census Conversion to Rich Text on AS. Also, it made me double check all my previous Census records, added over a period of time and found one or two entry errors that I have now put right.

I would also be very interested to know if there are any future plans for other 'Conversions' to Rich Text for BMD,s etc?

[NickWalker]

I promised 14 years ago that when FH finally supports rich-text I would add the census source conversion routine and I like to keep my promises! I'm glad so many of you are finding it useful.

It wouldn't really be possible to convert a non-census plain source text directly into rich text because it just doesn't have any kind of standard formatting that it could reformat - census records have a single table that AS can identify but the other sources don't have this. It would be possible for AS to pull in all the facts and individuals with citations linked to the source (as it does above the grid for the census source conversion) and then allow you to generate new source text from that using a rich Auto-text template. But various fields that are used to populate the source text would all have to be entered again (e.g. Marital status, Other Information, who registered the birth, etc.). e.g. For a baptism it wouldn't really be able to accurately populate the date of birth for example because a birth fact may have several citations and the actual birth date recorded may not match the date that was written in the baptism record.

So I'm not really convinced that it is practical to do a plain text to rich text conversion for non-Census as it probably ends up being less problematic just to enter them again. But I'm happy to hear any suggestions as to how this could be done.

However, I do think the conversion from generic to templated sources ought to be do-able for the non-census source types and so I do have it on the long-list to tackle one day.

[NickWalker]

I've been using your program back since it was called gedcom census around 2006 I think (and it only did censuses if I recall correctly, the other boxes were greyed out) and have donated three times. Maybe it is time to donate again.

Actually Gedcom Census only dealt with census (the greyed out options for other sources were in the early versions of AS) and it only handled a small number of standard columns for each census. This is what it looked like:

[klm2OUMK]

Thank Nick. Thought that might be the answer