* Importing formatted text/rtf

[Woodg]

Hi All,

My latest issue around moving from Relatively Yours 3 to FH7 is around rich text.

RY3 has had word processing facilities for text for over 25 years. Not wanting to lose the formatted text is one of the reasons I delayed moving the FH until v7 arrived. It appears I waited for nothing!

RY3 has options to export rich text as "text" or "rtf" format. Since rtf retains all formatting details (fonts, tables, bold, etc) it should come across easily - after all "rtf" stands for Rich Text Format! Well, no! It seems the RY3 GEDCOM export has (yet another) bug. The rtf text in the exported GEDCOM as appears as a BLOB. Here are a few lines of the text export:

FORM rtf
2 BLOB
3 CONT SplmR4MlL43iQqZQN4JaNX/QN4JaR43WAXIoSplaPqtoR47gSplaA3lnRqZnQplaMqVVQbBZ
3 CONT R1.UEL7dMKkvTLhQNX3QNatdP3laMqVVQbBZR1.UJ4ZhNLAUHaJr637jPK3iCrpvL4MmL4Ni

As you can see the FORM tag says rtf but the text is not like any rtf data I've ever seen.

Unfortunately it imports into FH7 like this:

FH7 BLOB.png (4.8 KiB) Viewed 636 times

It seems FH7 doesn't import BLOBs. Understandable, really, seeing as BLOBs were removed from GEDCOM 5.5.1 and RY3 can only export to GEDCOM 5.5 "standards".

Any way around this? (He asks hopefully.)

Now, the good news is that I do have a poor but useable workaround. I only have a very small number of rich texts that I really want to retain the formatting and I can just use good old Copy & Paste from RY3 to FH7, although I do loose some of the formatting around tables as it appears that FH7 tables don't allow the cell background/fill to be coloured. FH7 can do coloured text and coloured highlighter, just not coloured cell fill. (I might ask CP if this lack of cell fill colour is intentional or a bug.)

Thanks,

Glenn

[NickWalker]

I am pretty certain that not being able to fill in cell colours is currently "by design" in FH7 but I guess it's possible they will add more features to the rich text functionality in future versions.

Family Historian doesn't actually use 'rich text format' it has it's own formatting system which is text based and actually looks more like HTML than RTF. So exporting in RTF certainly won't help. Unless the software can export in the format used in FH 7 there's very little chance of getting the formatting transferred. So it looks like plain text is your only option, combined with the copy and paste method!

[Woodg]

Thanks Nick. I didn't realise FH couldn't read/convert rtf. Text and "copy and paste" it is then.

As for the cell background colour, I assumed CP "bought in" a rich text editor function rather than write their own from scratch, and such third-party utilities/functions/controls/add-ins are usually quite feature-rich (although my experience with programming is from the last century with COBOL being the primary language taught at university, plus a little self-taught Visual Basic from early this century.)

Any way, cell background is a nice-to-have. I'll eventually get my data moved to FH even if I have to manually re-enter it!

Regards,

Glenn.

[tatewise]

FYI: The RY3 use of _TXT TYPE FORM BLOB does not even look like GEDCOM 5.5 BLOB intended only in OBJE Media records.
I suspect it is a private FY3 data structure that uses the TYPE FORM BLOB tags in a non-standard way.

[NickWalker]

Thanks Nick. I didn't realise FH couldn't read/convert rtf. Text and "copy and paste" it is then.

As for the cell background colour, I assumed CP "bought in" a rich text editor function rather than write their own from scratch, and such third-party utilities/functions/controls/add-ins are usually quite feature-rich (although my experience with programming is from the last century with COBOL being the primary language taught at university, plus a little self-taught Visual Basic from early this century.)

Any way, cell background is a nice-to-have. I'll eventually get my data moved to FH even if I have to manually re-enter it!

Regards,

Glenn.

FH use the standard Microsoft RTF control (as do I in Ancestral Sources) but FH only uses a subset of the rtf functionality. For example tables within tables are not allowed and as you've pointed out, cell fills. The RTF control is capable of handling those but the underlying rich text format that FH uses (known as 'FTF' which stands for 'Family Historian Text Format') doesn't support it. In Ancestral Sources (and I would imagine FH does this too) when you paste in rich text it converts it into FTF and then converts the FTF back into rich text to display in the control so you don't get to see anything in the control that isn't handled by FH.

[Woodg]

Thanks Nick. I always like knowing a little about the underlying plumbing of software. I find it helps me better understand why things work.