Family Historian User Group

The facts/witness note field is probably used in a great number of different ways.

As a (long ago) TMG refugee I started with using delimiters to divide the note field into 'sub-notes'. Then I found out that in FH with GetParagrah CR/LF could be used as a delimiter. Seemed like an improvement, but it didn't work as expected for the Witness note field (leading blank lines are ignored). The next try was GetLabeledText which was an improvement, especially used in combination with autotext to generatie the labels.

But, when the project grew I saw a lot of auto-generated text with no sub-note. Examples like time of birth (known, maybe in less than 5-10% of the births), relations of witnesses to the bride and groom (also may in less than 5-10%) etc.
I found it to be distracting and cluttering my project, so I reverted to the first solution, just enter the data (sub-note) that is referenced in the fact sentence definition and use a delimiter when there is more than 1 sub-note.

Since the delimiter isn't needed often (most situations only need one data-item in the note field) it works well. However, in more complex fact sentences (e.g. a will) I use them extensively.

With this lengthy introduction, I hope to have given some background and arguments for my wish: a tooltip of some kind for the fact note field. Anything, a real tooltip or some 'gray' explanation in the note field itself of what data is expected in the note field and how and where to use the delimiters. These tooltips could then be part of the fact type definition dialogs.

N.B. An example where this is already available in FH is the source template. When defining a template one can specify/clarify what is expected to be typed into that field. Please provide the same (or comparable) for the fact types.

A thought from me...

The Fact (Type) Definition / Advanced... window includes an "Auto-Create Note:"

I use this to record occasional instructions for how to use this particular Fact Type - e.g. my Custom fact "Educated" includes an Auto-Create Note of "Use "CAUS" to record which type of school, e.g. 'secondary school'"

I can see that it's not quite what you want because I always have to remove the auto-created note after I've created the fact and read it, and it wouldn't therefore still be around as a reminder. But it might work as a short-term alternative.

Hi Adrian, your solution is what I meant when I wrote that I used autotext to generate the labels. And, indeed it labels the field and by that provides the user with information about what needs be entered. You can even leave it if it's between [...] (it will be disregarded then).

However, I use the note field in numerous fact types to 'upgrade' my sentences and then, when using this approach one will end up with (in my view) a lot of irrelevant disregarded autotext. Hence my use of just inserting the data needed for the fact, with loosing the meta-data (what this data is about) as a consequence. Which is sad, because it can easily be solved since it's fact type dependent and as such could very well be part of the sentence definition of a fact type for the note field.

Your suggestion sounds interesting. Similar to the Prompt feature of templated Metafields.

Regarding, 'irrelevant disregarded autotext' you can delete the labels that are irrelevant and just leave the ones with data.

Yes Mike, I know and I did, but why make life complex if solutions are easy to come by... I hope/whish.