* adding notes/media

[j9sunny]

Hello all,
Opinions sought, please!
I have some original letters from my grandfather to his mother shortly before he was killed at The Somme.
I have scanned the originals (into pdfs), and I have separately transcribed them to a laid-out word document with notes and comments, which I would like to include in my project.
As I see it, my choices are to strip out the formatting and use rich text and add it as a note (losing the lay-out) or I add the word document to the media tab and link. I've done the latter but it means the person opening the file would have to have word installed.
Also I don't want the word document editable by anybody else (or me by accident).
In an ideal world, eventually I'd like to have a pdf file of several pages with the originals and the transcriptions but, at the moment, it's one file at a time!
Is there a right and wrong way to treat documents/letters etc?
Thanks
Janine

[Woodg]

You could convert the Word document to pdf (Print to PDF feature). This means other people won't need Word to view the document, just a PDF viewer which most web browsers will have built-in. It also "locks" the PDF from accidental changes.

Others may have better ideas specifically related to FH.

[j9sunny]

Thanks!

[tatewise]

The technique I would adopt is essentially the same for all documents.

1) Scan an image of the document (original letter in this case) and attach that to the Media tab of the Source record.

2) In the Text From Source field of the Source record use the Rich Text word-processing features to recreate a transcript of the document (original letter in this case). This allows the text to be searched using Queries, etc.

3) Complete the other fields of the Source record to provide Title, Author, Repository, Footnote, etc, etc.

That technique allows either the image or the transcript or both to appear in Reports.

The technique works for BMD Certificates, Census pages, Wills, letters, and most other documents.
The only type of document where that is not so easy is long multi-page documents, where a PDF and just a few key images and a synopsis of the transcript might work.

It is perfectly feasible to attach PDF or Word documents as Media but they then cannot appear in Reports, and must be included along with Reports to complete the source details if you want to print them or send them to someone.

[j9sunny]

Thanks for the reply - it pretty much answers every question. I have a lot of original documents/letters/diaries so wanted to have a system in place which would be consistent from the start.
Janine