Create A Book option for RM8

RootsMagic
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Does anyone know if or when the “Create A Book” option will be available in RM8? It sure makes good Family Christmas Gifts.

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When the Community Preview was launched last New Year’s Eve, there was a list of features that would not be included in the initial public release but would come in a subsequent update. RM Inc policy is to refrain from promising timelines.

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And where could one find said list, Tom? Thank you.

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This is from an email received from Bruce by beta testers on 2 August 2020:

"For all the new testers just joining us, we have decided to temporarily postpone some features from the RM8 beta (and initial release). There are several reasons for this:

  1. Some features are requiring rewrites (or newly write from scratch) of libraries which we had available for Windows but which are not available for Mac.
  2. Some features are mostly ready, but will require substantially more testing than we are prepared to do before release.
  3. Some features are fully working on Windows, but not on Mac. Our promise is for the Windows and Mac version to be feature compatible, so we won’t release features that only work on one platform or another.
  4. RM8 is the biggest rewrite in our company’s history, and we want to avoid the situation we had when we released RM4, when we released so many new features that it took several years to stabilize the code.
  5. And frankly, our users are getting impatient and want us to release this. We can either release it soon with a slightly reduced feature set, or continue to finish writing / testing all the features and continue to delay its release. We have chosen the former.

Our current plan is to release RM8 minus the following features (most of which are written, but need significant testing before we feel comfortable releasing them):

  • RootsMagic To-Go (RM8 will run from a flash drive by just copying it to the drive. 8.0 just won’t have the interface that does the copying, etc for the user)
  • Shareable Drive (RM8 will be able to open / view a read only file. 8.0 just won’t have the code to “create” the drive with the menu program)
  • Publisher (we want to make sure the all new report engine is completely stable before testing / releasing the publisher)
  • Spell check (we are having to rewrite the spell check engine to properly support both Windows and Mac)
  • RTF export (we are having to rewrite the RTF library to support both Windows and Mac)
  • CountyCheck (needs to be modified to support running on Mac)
  • Some of the more advanced features in tasks, mapping, etc. These have been temporarily pulled because they require more testing / coding time than we currently can allocate."
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In the FAQ for the Community Preview was this:

What features from previous versions aren’t in the community preview?

Some features from previous version of RootsMagic still require more development and testing before we make them available to the public. They are:

  • RootsMagic To-Go
    RootsMagic 8 will already run from a flash drive by just copying it to the drive. The automated interface / utility that copies the files and data is not yet ready.
  • Shareable Drive
    RootsMagic 8 can already open and view a file in read-only mode. The ability to automatically “create” the drive and the menu program are not yet ready.
  • Publisher
    We want to make sure the all-new report engine is completely stable before testing / releasing the book publishing feature.
  • Custom Reports
    We want to make sure the all-new report engine is completely stable before testing / releasing the custom reports feature.
  • Spell-check
    The spell-check engine is being rewritten to properly support both Windows and MacOS.
  • RTF export
    The rich-text file export for reports is being rewritten to support both Windows and MacOS.
  • CountyCheck
    CountyCheck needs more development to support MacOS.

Work continues on these features and they will be added as they are completed. Our current plan is to release RootsMagic 8 minus these missing features and add them in updates when they are ready.

I think all of those are still the case but the absence of RTF may be moot now that DOCX is supported. TXT is also absent but it was a tab-delimited format for list reports in spreadsheet format for which XSLX support is a superior replacement

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From what Bruce said in the recent webinar, I believe it was the working with files one, RTF isn’t going to be an option precisely because of the inclusion of .docx.

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Thank you, @Terry and @TomH

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I use GedSite from John Cardinal to produce a web site version of my RM family tree. I can’t speak too highly of GedSite - it has been my one-stop shop for the last 10 years for data checking, sharing with relatives, etc. And John provides real gold-standard support.

John Cardinal has a program called Publisher to produce an ebook version of Gedcom data. I’ve not used this (yet) but given experience with John’s other products I would be very surprised if it isn’t one of the best around.

Cheers John

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