I’m using (Windows 10) RM v10.0.5.0 + Charting Companion v8.4.9 = Issue:
Descendant Book, Footnotes & Endnotes aren’t printing.
Pierre Clouthier, Developer at Progeny Genealogy, is aware of the issue, has replicated the issue and is looking into it.
Are there any RM users that know of this issue and moreover, have any suggested workarounds?
Thank you very much for any help.
Charting Companion could read an RM7 database directly, or it could use GEDCOM as input. I haven’t used Charting Companion for RM8/9/10, so I don’t know how well Charting Companion does at reading the new database format directly. Have you tried the GEDCOM option? That might be a workaround.
Thanks Jerry for the suggestion. In answer to your question, no, I haven’t tried the GEDCOM option; however, in checking just now, that option doesn’t apply to notes or source citations.
Charting Companion 8(recent versions) work with RM but some reports load very slowly.
I will try a descendant book and let you know about notes.
update – I am not sure what they normally should look like – but mine appear to have none.
Thank you Kevin for your test and confirming the existence of the problem. As mentioned, the issue has been reported to the developer and he has also found that it’s a repeatable problem.
I’m quite impressed with RootsMagic and its depths, though I’ve only started to plumb them since purchasing the program in September. This is why I appreciate your input as an experienced RM user in case this issue had an identified cause. For now, we’ll wait to hear from Pierre.
The last update of Charting Companion that is directly related to a RM upgrade was:
Nov 2021 | 8.1 Windows | Accelerated graphics; Apple M1; RootsMagic 8; Windows 11
There was a subsequent one but it was specifically for the ‘?’ variable in media paths so it is irrelevant to this problem. So the current version of CC appears to be two major versions behind in support of RM databases.
I don’t have CC so I’ve no direct knowledge of what it can do. The website is uninformative about Notes and Citations and the screenshot you provided has a truly ambiguous statement about “Fast GEDCOM”. The sentence “(for charts only, does not handle notes or source citations)” could mean:
Try GEDCOM and see what you get.
https://progenygenealogy.com/customer-support/version-history/
Thanks Tom; it was worth a shot. Issue persisted using GEDCOM (in lieu of .rmtree) for both Endnotes and Footnotes.
Tom - Do you think that the sources have been entered into RM via the RM TreeShare for Ancestry could be involved in some way?
I can’t say. I would not be surprised if the loss of citations was because RM introduced a level of indirection between Citation data and where they are used. I don’t remember if that was in 8 or 9 - I think 8 and Progeny should have caught it then.
Edit: revised a poorly worded sentence that could be inferred to mean the added indirection affected only TreeShared Ancestry sources. And, once again, the Professor @thejerrybryan said it much better and thoroughly.
However, that only covers citations, not Notes. Did they come across via the GEDCOM? Your response was silent @Kelly
I’m doubtful that TreeShare has anything to do with a problem with sources, or at least not directly.
Beginning with RM8, there was an additional level of indirection in the RM database for citations. That’s all citations, whether from TreeShare or that you entered yourself. Therefore, Charting Companion would not have been able to do anything with RM’s citations on a direct read of an RM database beginning with RM8 unless it had added support for the RM8/9/10 style of citations. So either Charting Companion has added support for the RM8/9/10 style of citations on a direct read or else the only option for RM8/9/10 is GEDCOM. I don’t know which is the case.
The best I can tell, anything else that Charting Companion might do with a direct read of an RM database should still sort of “just work” even in RM8/9/10 as long as it does not involve citations.
The key question from you to Charting Companion with respect to RM8/9/10 is “Does Charting Companion support RM’s new CitationLinkTable in RM8/9/10 on a direct read?”.
Great question Jerry, and I have reached out to the developer with this question.
I’m unaware that Descendant Book Options support an option to print Notes using either .ged or .rmtree; however, in my dataset used in tests, I don’t recall ever using Notes in RM.
Tom & Jerry - Thank you both very much for your help - it is most appreciated!
What are levels of indirection?
Pre-RM8 a citation for a fact was linked this way:
FactID > CitationID > SourceID
Now they are linked
FactID > CitationLinkID > CitationID > SourceID
That allows the Citation data to be reused for multiple facts whereas, before, they could only be used for one fact. That’s the added level of indirection.
I don’t think the GEDCOM data structure supports the added level which is a reason for RM to have switched drag’n’drop from a background GEDCOM export-import to a more direct transfer of data. However, RM would|should have modified its GEDCOM Export process to convert from my simple 4-level illustration to the 3-levels required for the file to be compatible with other systems.
The option is shown in your screenshot “Notes to print”. To be consistent with the Fast GEDCOM option and its warning “(for charts only, does not handle notes or source citations)”, the options for Notes and Sources should be grayed out for Chart settings if that’s how a .GED file was opened.
Thank you for that Tom. I had forgotten about that. If anybody is curious, the other options from the pulldown menus are:
If I may, I would like to follow up on the concept of a program such as Charting Companion.
It’s actually not very easy to produce good quality reports for genealogy. So I have sometimes wished that there were a product that would work well for producing reports for genealogy, no matter if I were using RM or if I were using one of RM’s competitors. That way, the development costs for such a reporting program could be amortized across a user base of all genealogy users, not just across genealogy users for one particular product. So when Charting Companion first came out, I purchased it on hopes that it might be such a product that would produce excellent reports no matter what genealogy software I was using.
Also, I was able to purchase Charting Companion from the RM Web site at the time. I don’t know what if any relationship there was or still is between the two companies. I will just leave it at that.
In any case, I like Charting Companion’s reports. However, for the most part they do not meet my needs because they do not support sentence templates. So they produce what they produce and I have very little control beyond that. I do still use Charting Companion occasionally, but I still use RM itself for most of my reporting.
Since then, another third party program has come along called GedSite which works well for producing Web pages using data from RM or from any of RM’s competitors. And GedSite supports sentence templates. In the case of RM, GedSite will use RM’s sentence templates or you can set up sentence templates in GedSite itself. Because GedSite supports its own sentence templates, you can use it to generate Web pages from software that itself does not support sentence templates.
But I’m still interested in the printed page. Since the original release of GedSite, the same company has released an additional product called Gedcom Publisher which makes excellent books. The only problem is that the “excellent books” are ebooks which don’t work on the printed page. So it seems to me that the genealogy software industry is still lacking a good piece of software that supports sentence templates and which produces good quality reports for the printed page and which supports those reports no matter which genealogy software you are using.
Very intersting your comments on Reporting programs.
Have you also tested or an opinion about" The Complete Genealogy Reporter" ?
http://www.tcgr.bufton.org/tcgrover.htm
I have not tested The Complete Genealogy Reporter, but it looks like it has lots of nice features. Sadly, I am not able to test the product at this time for the simple reason that the company is ceasing business operations and no longer offers the product. Nigel Bufton Software ceasing operations
Genealogy software is a bit of a niche market, often served by very small companies or even one person companies. The motivation for those companies may be as much a love of genealogy as it is a need to make a living. So it seems to me that there is a much greater risk of a genealogy software product exiting from the marketplace than there is for products from much larger companies such as Apple and Microsoft.
I sometimes wonder in the longer run, like over the next 25 to 50 years, if the surviving genealogy software might be more likely to follow the open source model than the “very small company for profit” model. The only genealogy software product I’m aware of at the present time that follows the open source model is Gramps. It is developed by its users and it is free to its users.
At the present time, Gramps seems so limited to me in its functionality that even as a free product it doesn’t come close to competing with products such as RootsMagic. But I wonder over period of many decades of development and improvement if Gramps might take over the genealogy software market. I won’t be around long enough to see the answer to that question, but it’s an interesting speculation.
