By the spouse sentence in RM’s narrative reports I mean the sentence for the person who is the spouse of the person in the main family line. If John Doe married Jane Smith, the first sentence for Jane Doe is the spouse sentence in a report for the Doe family and the first sentence for John Doe is the spouse sentence in a report for the Smith family.
I have noticed that the spouse sentence in RM9’s Register Reports (NEHGS) and Modified Register Reports (NGSQ) begins with a space. Because these sentences are set off into a new paragraph, the practical effect is that a new line begins with a single space and therefore is slightly indented. The effect is there but is hard to notice when you are using RM’s default sentence templates. The effect is easy to notice when I’m using my point form sentence templates where every fact/event begins on a new line. In either case, the effect is unprofessional.
The spouse sentence also is preceded by a space in all three of RM’s indented reports - Outline, Henry, and D’Aboville. But in these cases, the spouse sentence is not set off into a new paragraph. Therefore, the blank before the spouse sentence is simply the space that always exists between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next sentence and the space is totally necessary.
Sentences in RM’s narrative reports for “Ancestors only” and “Ancestors with children” are formatted so differently than RM’s narrative reports for descendants that there is not an issue about any extra space in RM’s narrative reports for ancestors.
There is no workaround to get rid of the undesirable leading space when printing directly from RM or when saving as a PDF. When saving to DOCX files, there is an easy workaround within Microsoft Word. I assume that there is also an easy workaround with other word processors, but Microsoft Word is the one I am most familiar with. The workaround in Microsoft Word is as follows.
- Click the Pilcrow character (the backwards P) in Word’s ribbon to turn on the display of all the codes in your document.
- Do a global replace of ^pb with ^p.where b is a blank and not actually the letter b.
- Click the Pilcrow character again to turn off the display of all the codes on your document.
Even though I have a workaround, I hope this can be fixed. The tricky part of fixing it might be if RM is using the same code to generate the spouse sentence in register and modified register reports where the space shouldn’t be there that it uses to generate the spouse sentence in the indented reports where the space is necessary. The problem might be even tricker to fix if the bug is in a library routine that RM is using to generate the reports.