If I’m understanding it right from a previous question/comment, a “book” is one person/couple and a “chapter” is a report within that book?
If that’s right, do I generate and save reports individually and then somehow bring them into that person’s book, or is there a way to tell RM that I want, say, 5 different reports generated at one time on a person and then attach them or bring them into the book?
And if all THAT’S right, can I somehow combine all those books into one volume with RM?
I’ve been using RM for 15+ years, and this morning REwatched the webinars for RM9, RM10, Creating a New Book, & Adding Chapters . . . but I’m still missing something. I wish there was a definition of terminology and a sort of checklist on what to do and in what order to be produce a book!
Not necessarily. Think of a Book as a general container. Certainly you could create a book that focused on a single person or couple. But you could just as easily create a Book that covers a broader topic, just like normal books.
For example, a physical book on my shelf is “A Bicentennial History of DeKalb County, Tennessee” by Thomas Gray Webb. As you can imagine, there’s a whole bunch more than just one person or couple mentioned in that book. Chapter titles include “The First People: Native Americans”, “The Farm”, “Federal Soldiers in the Civil War”.
Similarly you might create a book called “The Tyes That Bind Us”, and each chapter might be dedicated to a branch of your family ancestors (including your direct ancestors and all their offspring, etc), with different reports interspersed between “Text Page” inserts where you write a narrative about that branch.
Edit to say: the RM “Book” generator isn’t exactly a tour-de-force of publishing prowess. Probably most useful for creating the framework for a book, and then saving in Word format for further editing.
RM’s concept of a book and its chapters really has nothing to do with the subject of the book or any of its chapters. You could have chapters about totally unrelated people. It might or might not make any sense to do so, but RM’s Book feature itself doesn’t care one way or the other.
Here is the way I think about it. Suppose I make 5 different RM reports and print them to paper. I could keep the 5 reports completely separate. Or as a totally manual procedure, I could bind them together into a single book.
That’s more or less what RM’s Book feature does. It binds multiple RM reports into a single book, except that it does it electronically rather than manually. Binding the chapters together into a book electronically offers a lot of new possibilities. For example, RM’s books can have a table of contents. RM’s books can have a single citation list that covers all the chapters. RM’s books can have a single name index and a single place index that covers all the chapters. Those are things you cannot do simply by binding separate printed reports together manually.
