Narrative reports Carriage return

lancashiredave · Post by **lancashiredave** » 26 Dec 2008 10:11

Is it possible to insert carriage returns into the narrative reports.
At the moment sentences just follow on one after the other.
I would like to insert carriage returns to make the report more readable.

Best wshes
David[confused]

ID:3240

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 27 Dec 2008 07:58

Not that I am aware. You could use the individual summary report, which does one event per line.

lancashiredave · Post by **lancashiredave** » 27 Dec 2008 08:03

Thanks Jane
I will give that try
David

redrock · Post by **redrock** » 29 Dec 2008 09:44

Can I strongly add my support to Lancashire Dave's query.

I bought FH V2 several years ago, because of the brilliant diagrams and innovative structure, but found I couldn't use it as my main genealogy archive because of the lack of some critical features and the learning curve involved. The product just wasn't mature enough for my purposes. So I stayed with 'Legacy' and am currently using Legacy version 7. Legacy is a bit old fashioned in some areas but it is a very mature product and it works.

But times move on and now I am hoping that, with the announcement of V4, Family Historian has finally 'arrived' and I can begin to use it as my main archive. So I have recently bought V3/V4 upgrade and am currently doing an in depth evaluation of V3 features. I will be doing the same with V4 in February before making a final decision whether to move my main archive to Family Historian. Unfortunately, one of the 'cannot live with' areas in V3 is the crude formatting and lack of user flexibility in the narrative report. This problem is important to me because the narrative report is the one I use most and I am typically producing reports covering 50+ pages, 10+ generations and hundreds of people.

I have had a look at the make-up of the relevant FHR file and it doesn't look too difficult a job, for someone who knows what they are doing, to modify it to satisfy Dave's(and my)requirement. If it isn't appropriate for the software developers to do it, I am sure they could give users the appropriate guidance notes to do it themselves.

ChrisBowyer · Post by **ChrisBowyer** » 30 Dec 2008 06:05

Seems to me if you want to be fussy about layout, open it in your word processor and fiddle about with it. Any rule for inserting paragraph breaks is unlikely to work perfectly for everyone in the report anyway. It is after all meant to be narrative (i.e. in sentences and paragraphs) not formal like an outline or record detail report.

What I'd class as 'critical' features in the narrative reports is getting the facts complete, correct, and readable. There are a few deficiencies in the former in FH (reporting alternative names springs to mind), but the latter I think is nicely done with Fact sets and individually customisable sentences (had you missed these features when you said 'lack of user flexibility in the narrative report'?)

Computer generated text is always going to be a bit stylised, but I see quite a lot of reports from research contacts using a variety of systems, and the ones produced by FH are generally far better.

redrock · Post by **redrock** » 30 Dec 2008 13:57

Sorry Chris, it is not being fussy about layout. It is about producing reports that are easy and a pleasure for anyone to read. I don't think anyone would enjoy reading a book/ report made up of a succession of staccato sentences and few paragraphs or bullet points, however accurate the data is. Most would simply lose interest.

It is also a question of scale. If the report is a short one I agree that it can easily be formatted to individual taste in a word processor and I have done this on many occasions. However, if its a long report covering many generations (as mine are), reshaping the basic format of the report in a word processor becomes completely impractical.

I hadn't missed the customisable sentence features. I just see them as very limited in scope and they don't do very much for the overall presentation, flow and readability of the report. I suppose my problem is that I have until now been using a software programme with reporting features that are a very hard act to follow. If the narrative reporting features stay the same in V4, and I do decide to use FH as my main database, my best bet is going to be to export data back to Legacy to use Legacy's reporting features. C'est la vie.

jeemo · Post by **jeemo** » 30 Dec 2008 21:07

ChrisBowyer said : 'It is after all meant to be narrative (i.e. in sentences and paragraphs) not formal like an outline or record detail report.'

Chris,

To me, that is the very point of redrock's observations; paragraphs the same way you did (twice) in your post. Your suggestion of reformatting is totally impracticable when generating pages for a web site as they continually get overwritten. There are workarounds but they are terribly time consuming and I stopped doing it for that reason. I also think many users of the programme wouldn't know (or want to know) how to insert break tags in the HTML.

One example where the feature is needed can be seen at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.anc ... d1141.html . The only new paragraphs in this are ones I've made in notes. I would dearly like to be able to tell the software where to start a new paragraph to make this easier to read. I have a number of reports of this sort of length.

Implementing it shouldn't be that difficult as it could be another feature in the 'Insert Code' part of the 'Fact Definition' which would allow a new paragraph at the start of an event or attribute; e.g. {np}.

Can we please make the best Narrative Report software I've seen even better? You can vote for it on wish list item 251.

ChrisBowyer · Post by **ChrisBowyer** » 31 Dec 2008 01:44

Fair enough... I guess it all goes to prove that we all use this software in different ways for different reasons. I would never have dreamt of trying to produce a document about one individual on that scale by this sort of method. For me, the important thing is to get the facts right, and I've raised a number of wish list requests in that vein in the past. Whatever they do it won't please all the people all the time, and I'm glad I don't have the problem of deciding on development priorities.

lancashiredave · Post by **lancashiredave** » 23 Jan 2009 09:29

I have been having a play with carriage returns and have discovered it is possible to include them in a notes field.
what you have to do is Type some text into a word document, just a few characters separated with a return character.
Then copy that text and paste it into a notes field.
When you look at the notes field you will see a square box in place of the carriage return.
You can then copy and paste this within Family historian to any other notes field as and when you require.
The only problem is, it doesn't work if this is the first character in a notes field. The first character it seems must be a printing character.
I am using a full stop at the moment as it isnt too noticeable.
This method isnt perfect but its better than nothing and it does allow some control over narrative formatting.

Dave
[smile]

jeemo · Post by **jeemo** » 23 Jan 2009 11:09

lancashiredave said:
I have been having a play with carriage returns and have discovered it is possible to include them in a notes field.

Thanks Dave, that's true but I believe what we really need is the capability of starting a new paragraph in the Sentence field not the Notes field and that that instruction be inserted at the start rather than the end of an event or attribute.

Recognising a Carriage Return at the start of the Notes field would be good too.

John

lancashiredave · Post by **lancashiredave** » 23 Jan 2009 16:51

I agree John, but for the live of me I cant find a way to do it.
[confused]
Dave

Post by **nsw** » 23 Jan 2009 18:58

If you do a CTRL+Enter in the notes pop-up box does it appear in the report when at the start of a note?

lancashiredave · Post by **lancashiredave** » 23 Jan 2009 19:25

Hi Nick,
If I do a Ctrl+Enter at the beginning of note it appears in the note but not in the narrative report.
I still have to put a printing character before it to get the narrative report generator to recognise it.
And as John said what we really need is to be able to add a carriage return to the sentence field.

It does seem like it would be such an easy thing to implement and it would be so useful at least for some of us.
Or perhaps I dontreally understand the complexity of the software.

Dave

Post by **nsw** » 23 Jan 2009 21:40

Ah OK - I think it does work with an individual's note but not with a fact note. I think as it has to appear in a sentence any spaces or carriage returns are being stipped out from the start and end of the line to avoid spaces that have accidentally been added from appearing and ruining the look of the sentence. However, I agree that a carriage return option for the sentence field would be good and I would have thought very easy to implement.

RalfofAmber · Post by **RalfofAmber** » 24 Jan 2009 08:32

I would agree with Nick - in many programming languages gone by you could inject a simple sequence such as n for new line into a print statement and have it come out correctly. Maybe rendering HTML tags is the way forward?

IanHiggs · Post by **IanHiggs** » 24 Jan 2009 11:11

Being something of a techy, I looked at the file formats to understand the limitations.

The notes are held in the GED file with CR being preserved by using CONT lines:

1 NOTE Test note
2 CONT Runs over
2 CONT several lines

The sentences for the narrative reports are held in FHF files.
These follow the 'well known' INI file format.
For example, I have a custom event 'Moved' - for recording that somebody moved house.
(Yes I am sure that there are better ways...)

The file ...Fact TypesCustomCustom.fhf includes

[FCT-EVEN-MOVED-IE]
Name=Moved
Template={individual} moved to {_place} {date}
Event Tab=
Rec Win=Moved to {_place} {date}
Label=Moved to
Abbr=
Hidden=N

i.e. The template sentence is limited to a single line.
This means that, even if you could insert a CR at the start of the template, it would be lost when you next opened FH.

Therefore, we do want to allow some form of mark-up in the templates:
n and f to follow one convention or
{NL} and {NP} to match the current FH convention.

I guess we must wait a few weeks and see what FH4 brings us.

JonAxtell · Post by **JonAxtell** » 24 Jan 2009 11:48

'The only problem is, it doesn't work if this is the first character in a notes field. The first character it seems must be a printing character.'

I've reported this as a serious bug on 21Feb2008 as it can potentially remove user's data. It's also related to the fact that FH will delete parts of notes that include lots of spaces (more than 250) which might have been used to tabulate some data. Hopefully this bug will have been fixed in V4.

IanHiggs · Post by **IanHiggs** » 24 Jan 2009 12:57

The loss of spaces (in Notes) seems to be a side effect of FH's handling of the GEDCOM file format.

If a note runs into more than 248 characters, then the extra is stored in a CONC line. When the file is read in, CONC lines seems to have leading and trailing spaces removed. So multiple spaces will be lost if they fell on the join between CONC lines. Also, when the GED file is next saved, the extra spaces are gone.

Leading spaces following a CR may get saved as FH seems to preserve leading spaces for a CONT line.

The GEDCOM spec does not seem to explicitly define this behaviour, saying only 'CONT line implies that a new line should appear to preserve formatting. CONC implies concatenation to the previous line without a new line.'.

mezentia · Post by **mezentia** » 29 Jan 2009 18:31

I think that the ability to format notes is a wish list item. I certainly would appreciate the ability to use fairly standard formatting such as user-defined tabs, paragraphs, different fonts, bold, italic, etc, and tables, as well as being able to insert hyperlinks and 'clickable' cross references to other people in the database.

How much of this is possible whilst maintaining strict adherence to GEDCOM standards is debateable. I have long advocated a move to GEDXML which, I think, would solve many of these problems.

Post by **nsw** » 29 Jan 2009 21:57

To adhere to GEDCOM the note has to be text so I can't see why FH in future coul couldn't save a note using HTML, or a variation which would allow the formatting you mention. Ability to format notes and source text, etc. has been my number 1 on the wishlist since I started using Family Historian around 5 years ago.

ChrisBowyer · Post by **ChrisBowyer** » 30 Jan 2009 02:35

At the risk of being boring, it doesn't matter to me as a user which version of the Gedcom standard (if any) FH stores its own data in, as long as it provides the functionality I need.

But this means I need to be able to export a 'standard' Gedcom to upload to GR, Ancestry and the like (take standard to mean lowest common denominator, as defined by what other genealogy software commonly supports, rather than what any formal standard says). If you allow formatting in notes (by whatever convention) it needs to be converted to plain text by an export function. This already applies to event sentences and other FH specific extensions and custom events (regardless of whether they conform to the formal standard) that are currently lost when it's uploaded.

This would be a major change of philosophy for FH, but would allow a lot of wish list requests currently out of scope to be considered, and also allow us to stop arguing about Gedcom standards.

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