Family Historian User Group

My FH work is intended for use by succeeding generations of my family; they will be unfamiliar with all the detail embedded in the records and despite diagrams will find navigation difficult. I would like to be able to colour code[highlight]specific individuals in the Index to the CD or website[particularly the CD]for whom particularly interesting notes/documentation exist[cool]

ID:6054

I haven't yet had a good play with FHv5, but I suspect that FH itself is not capable of doing this as it won't know which ones are of particualr interest.

However, any word processing program will be able to open the .html file as something you can edit. Go to the website/CD folder before you burn it onto a disk. Find the index file and open it with Word (right click and select open with). Then you can manually select the individuals and highlight them. Save the file when you're finished, double check in your browser it looks the way you want and burn the disk.

Merenwen, I am not sure how you achieved the highlighting using MS Word, because .html files are plain text.
The _nameindex.html file should only be edited with a plain text editor such as Notepad, or one of the many HTML Editors.
Then you need to know enough HTML syntax to adjust the highlighting.

TheDoc, when creating the FH CD/website there is an option to include as many Individuals as you like in the Table of Contents on the Home page (index.html).
See Step 4 - Add Items for Table of Contents > Available Items > Link to Page.
This is quite separate from the Index page (_nameindex.html).
The Table of Contents list of Individuals could be your 'specific Individuals' ... 'for whom particularly interesting notes/documentation exist'.

Recent versions of Word will edit an html file just as Merenwen described. I wouldn't use it to generate html, because the html it generates is dreadful, but it's perfectly adequate to change colours, apply highlights and such like. Just don't change the file type when you save it!

It might be worth investigating e.g. LibreOffice (free) to see if it can do the same thing.

tatewise said:
Merenwen, I am not sure how you achieved the highlighting using MS Word

Don't ask me technical questions like that, I just open Word and do it! [tongue] All I know it works under Word 2003 onwards. It might work on some earlier version too, not sure.

And Helen, I'm not sure. I know OpenOffice writer does and I think LibreOffice is the successor, but you might have to give it a go.

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTML_editors) AbiWord should work too (also free). Or there is NVU, which is a free HTML editor/webpage creator which allows you to either make changed Word processor style or edit the HTML code. Not recommended for inexperienced PC users.

OK, I stand corrected, but the important step is to use Save As and choose the .HTML format.
As you say it turns a small 6KB plain text file into a complex 194KB text file and an accompanying folder containing three small files.
Also in my experiment it disrupted the Home Statistics Index menu bar used by FH.

That's good to know. If it disrupts things, I'll go back to using Nvu to edit html. Just means I can only do it on one pc, but I'd rather do that than upset what FH creates.

In V5 You could easily write a plugin to process the _index page and then add a style class to the 'important' people based on using a flag.


Alternately why not simply add the 'key' people to the main front page table of contents.

WL#500 has been raise

I may have taken liberties with the wording - I hope it is true to the wants of the OP

Please vote for it here:

http://www.fhug.org.uk/wishlist/wldispl ... lwlref=500

I am not to clear why this has been created as a Wish List entry, since the originator TheDoc has never responded to my suggestion to use the Table of Contents to list 'specific individuals'.
All the other replies were simply offering ways to highlight Index entries.