* No searchable text in PDF reports

[AdrianBruce]

Teresa - you may realise this but the {xe "Stuff"} with a dotted underline in the MS Word rendering is normally hidden because it's where Word sticks its indexes - I can turn them on and off in Word with the Show/Hide button to "Show or hide tab marks in Word / Turn the display of formatting marks on or off". To what extent this might improve the Word based display, I've no idea - it clearly won't fix the image placing issue (which is present in v6 I now remember / realise).

[Mark1834]

I can display RTF output in Word. These are from an Individual Summary Report, with census Text from Source entered as tables. One is the PDF as output directly, and the other is from the RTF file imported into Word and printed to PDF with the FH PDF printer.

You can see that the direct PDF has the poorer print quality, but preserves the original layout. The RTF-derived file has sharper printing, but has corrupted the layout slightly, with the tables squashed together with rather too dominant grid lines. There are no images in this report, so the RTF-derived PDF is a mere 18 kB, while the direct PDF is exactly 1 MB for just over a page of text!

You pays your money and takes your choice - poor layout, sharp text, and small file versus better layout, less clear text, and huge file

RTF-derived print to PDF, 18 kB

Capture.PNG (96.3 KiB) Viewed 4516 times

Direct print to PDF, 1024 kB

CapturePDF.PNG (175.09 KiB) Viewed 4517 times

[Mark1834]

PS - note the wrapping in the Age column. This was not present in the original when entering the data into the RTF editor, but arises because the table is printed in a different font. For reasons I do not understand, CP have made it impossible to change the default font for rich text in isolation. Changing that also changes the default font for the Property Box, which is a different part of the app altogether! There is no way to link the font used for data entry to the font used for printing, you have to change it manually every time! There should be at least an option to display the table as it will print, but no, that's missing.

[NickiP]

The printing preference for links for the Family Historian PDF printer defaults to Automatically detect urls in text as per screenshot below:

FHv7 PDF Printing Preference - Links.JPG (45.7 KiB) Viewed 4500 times

This suggests that something with FH itself may be defaulting the reports to images before they even get to the pdf printer. The narrative report I managed to print after 1 hr 50 minutes to CutePDF doesn't have working search text or web links either.

This is, as others have said, a really retrograde step and I do hope it isn't intentional by CP otherwise in spite of the benefits of v7 I will be reverting back to v6 as narrative reports is large use of the software for me.

While I can export to rtf, as already said, it completely wrecks all image formatting so if I want images included in the narrative report it's a non-starter.

Added - that said "save as image" in a PDF writer program actually means save the pdf as an image file and that obviously isn't what is happening here. I used the functionality in CutePDF to save GRO pdfs or wills from the Probate Office as jpegs, albeit I think there may be the same functionality in more recent versions of Word if memory serves me right.

[tatewise]

Calico Pie have continued to remain annoyingly silent on this and the V7 PDF creation very slow, creating huge files (18533) topic despite a growing number of disgruntled users.

[ColeValleyGirl]

Like most of us CP have probably taken a break over Christmas and the New Year, and won't be back in the office until Monday. It's a bit rich to complain about them being annoyingly silent...

We know they're aware of the problem(s) -- people have logged them. They will be somewhere in their prioritised list of bugs, and may or may not be fixed when the first update is released, whenever that is.

In the meantime, continuing to investigate viable workarounds is the useful thing WE can do.

[Mark1834]

Agree that we have to give CP a fair chance to fix it, but for me it's a deal-breaker. My short term workaround is to stop making any amendments to my live database that rely on FH7 features in order to simplify reverting to FH6 should that become necessary.

[paultt]

@Helen,
It is a bit of a pity that v7 was launched when it was without warning, as I for one, was still building up a list of items to check and query. I have since logged calls covering some of these, and others have been logged according to the threads in this FHUG. Quite a few are semi-critical to the way we were used to working with v6, and work arounds seem to add so much more time and effort to get to the same results. More keystrokes, mouse clicks, floating windows that get in the way, particularly if you are working on a 17" monitor. Even my 22" runs out of screen estate when you have a browser open, and are trying to capture the info.

With CP's ticketing system, do you know how it works? I log an issue, am sent an email with a link to view the ticket (proof that they have received it), and when you go to view it, you see it has a Closed Status, with responded. As far as I am concerned, having worked in IT development, support, testing and installation for over 30 years before retirement, that Ticket should remain Open until my issue is fixed, with some sort of progress status reporting, so that we at least know that our issue/ticket has been scheduled....?

Also seriously thinking of reverting to v6!

[ColeValleyGirl]

A workaround for those of you who have images in your reports (for whom the rtf -> pdf route won't work.) It's extra steps (the same amount as the rtf route) but hopefully won't be needed for too long.

1. Print to the Microsoft XPS Document writer. You will get an oxps file.
2. Check you have the XPS viewer installed. If not (later installation of Windows 10, Start > Settings > Apps > Optional Features > Add a Feature > add the XPS Viewer).
3. Open the XPS Viewer, and use it to open the .oxps file.
4. Print to the PDF printer of your choice (Family Historian PDF or Microsoft Print to PDF).

[PeterR]

I followed Helen's recipe but still finished with a bloated image-only PDF with no searchable text.

[paultt]

Helen,

Just tried you XPF workaround - still get 379 blank pages! the .oxpf file size was 125k

[ColeValleyGirl]

Sorry -- there must be something in my PDF reader that automatically converts images to searchable text... I'm not recommending it to anyone because they've changed the pricing structure and it's now unaffordable for individuals.

And I'm obviously not the person to be looking for workarounds as I don't have the problem...

[Mark1834]

that Ticket should remain Open until my issue is fixed

That's exactly the issue we faced when I ran formal quality control systems in my old day job. External BSI/ISO auditors were very clear - you do not close a log when you note the issue, or even when you decide what to do. You close it when the corrective action is completed (or you decide no action is required).

[Mark1834]

I don't have the problem...

Helen - do you mean that your PDF generation works as expected, or that you never use it so it is not a problem for you? That sounds like key information to help CP diagnose the issue if it is the former.

[ColeValleyGirl]

Helen - do you mean that your PDF generation works as expected, or that you never use it so it is not a problem for you?

Both.

PDF generation creates a PDF faultlessly (albeit as an image) because I suspect of the 64Gb of memory I have; and then my PDF program converts the image to text etc. So no help to CP as the memory issue is obvious once you twig that FH is producing images.

And I don't use the facility at all -- I don't use reports at all except to generate websites.

[davepacey]

PDF generation creates a PDF faultlessly (albeit as an image) because I suspect of the 64Gb of memory I have; and then my PDF program converts the image to text etc. So no help to CP as the memory issue is obvious once you twig that FH is producing images.

And I don't use the facility at all -- I don't use reports at all except to generate websites.

As a matter of interest, which pdf program do you use? and how accurate is it running OCR on the image?

[ColeValleyGirl]

As a matter of interest, which pdf program do you use? and how accurate is it running OCR on the image?

NitroPDF.

Seems pretty accurate.

But no individual would buy it now -- they've gone the way of so many good programme -- towards the commercial marketplace.

[davepacey]

As a matter of interest, which pdf program do you use? and how accurate is it running OCR on the image?

NitroPDF.

Seems pretty accurate.

But no individual would buy it now -- they've gone the way of so many good programme -- towards the commercial marketplace.

Thanks, I have the adobe suite so have Acrobat, got to admit I haven't tried any save to RTF or anything yet, If I want a report, it is easier for me to export to v6 and run it from there

[fhtess65]

Ah, thanks - I'd forgotten I'd even turned that on! Fixed now.

Teresa

Teresa - you may realise this but the {xe "Stuff"} with a dotted underline in the MS Word rendering is normally hidden because it's where Word sticks its indexes - I can turn them on and off in Word with the Show/Hide button to "Show or hide tab marks in Word / Turn the display of formatting marks on or off". To what extent this might improve the Word based display, I've no idea - it clearly won't fix the image placing issue (which is present in v6 I now remember / realise).

[fhtess65]

I have now tried Scrivener, and it too can properly import the .rtf and then Compile to .pdf which is searchable. See screencaps. (I tried just to add to my previous post, but the forum wouldn't upload the additional screencaps)

I was able to make the export to .rtf and then publish to .pdf work, however, I had to use Papyrus Author. I tried using both Word and Atlantis, but neither couldn't read the table from FH7. I then tried in LibreOffice, and same result as Word and Atlantis. See attached...

Very interesting that only a very specialized piece of software like Papyrus Author (free version) was able to open and render the .rtf properly. Not many people would even have it. I will try it in Scrivener as well and see what happens.

[AdrianBruce]

Re Error Logging - this is another thing that varies incredibly. Working for a national IT organisation I can assure you that our First Line Support raised tickets that remained open only until they were handed over to Second Level, who raised their own tickets.

It was the Second Level Support ticket that remained open until the corrective action was completed. Otherwise we'd be pointlessly tracking perhaps dozens of calls on First Level, all of which pointed to just one software / configuration issue. And this was a process based on the itSMF (IT Service Management Forum), we didn't just conjure it up out of thin air.

[LornaCraig]

PDF generation creates a PDF faultlessly (albeit as an image) because I suspect of the 64Gb of memory I have; and then my PDF program converts the image to text etc. So no help to CP as the memory issue is obvious once you twig that FH is producing images.

Like Helen, I'm finding that the PDF generation is faultless, albeit slower than in V6 and producing a much bigger file that V6, and no searchable text. But I don't have the amount of memeory Helen has (just 16Gb on desktop, 8Gb on laptop) so whatever the problem is I don't think it's related to memory. It is baffling.

However, when testing on both desktop and laptop with an identical Ancestors by Generartion narrative report I noticed that the report generated by FH on the desktop was 129 pages long and the report on the desktop was 121 pages. I have the same report options set on both. This was as viewed in FH. Saving as PDF then faithfully reproduced the 129 pages and the 121 pages respectively. I haven't waded trough the whole report to spot all the differences but in some places it seems to be a matter of extra spaces between lines, especially (but not only) in the Source lists. So I am having some obscure issues with report generation, but not with PDF creation!

[ColeValleyGirl]

Thank you Adrian. We followed itSMF as well and only kept front line tickets open when first line support were working on them. Handed off to second line? Close.

[Mark1834]

It does rather beg the question of who is “first line” and “second line” for a company like CP where you could fit the entire workforce in one (non socially distanced) taxi. It would be normal commercial practice to employ contractors and/or volunteers to help with non-core support activities at times of high workload, so I suspect they have delegated first line to such support.

[Mark1834]

Adrian perfectly describes my experience as a customer of IT support in a large multinational who had contracted their global IT support (70,000 users) to a third party specialist. First line (who were very variable in their quality) raised the first ticket, and if they couldn’t deal with it, they passed it on to second line, who were the real experts. We didn’t always like their answer (no, you can’t install your own multifunction printer), but we always received one, and the ticket wasn’t closed until that was given.