Family Historian User Group

FH should be able to produce a bibliography in all reports that also produce citations.

Why: Most serious styles for the production of citations produce (a) a bibliography listing the sources used and (b) reference notes saying where each fact has come from (linking facts to the sources). Reference notes usually come in two flavours - initial and subsequent where full titles and authors' names appear in the initial ref. notes and abbreviated forms in the subsequent.

FH only produces an initial reference note format, causing those who take citation styles seriously to be dismissive of FH's reports. I can't get too excited about the omission of subsequent reference notes, not least because when reading them I have to look back to find the full title, etc. But it would be handy to have a bibliography of the sources used and complete a major omission in this aspect.

Way forward: The Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide on http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/too ... guide.html shows bibliography formats that ought to be employed. (CMoS formed the basis for Elizabeth Shown Mills' plethora of formats.)

An option might be provided to split the bibliography into published and unpublished sections, as per many history books, though this would seem to need a new custom GEDCOM item against the source as the current 'published' is also used for 'creation' date of unpublished stuff.

ID:5227

Is the way forward for someone to write a custom companion program (I'm not a programmer so I can't help in this regard) that would enable those that really want/need the extra capability of a bibliography to maintain it and produce custom reports.

Interesting thought.

However, I can only see 2 ways to do this: write a companion program that produces complete reports. This would basically end up something like TCGR and means that effectively all the effort that Calico Pie put into their reports is wasted. I rather like Calico's reports, especially the narrative reports. Plus very few, if any, add-on companies access the extra data that FH has for things like immigration.

The other way would be to take a report out of FH and insert a bibliography into the middle of it. That way Calico's work is used. I can see one possible first stage of that - save the report as an .RTF and open it in MS Word, which has Visual Basic for Applications as a computer language to back it up. Unfortunately, at a first glance I don't see any practical way to find the footnotes in the text, in order to disentangle the bibliographic data for insertion in a list back into the document. Unless anyone knows better?