As far as I can tell, my mother has been using RM for 20 years. The last printed descendants list I have is from 2006. After recovering her crashed harddrive, I found RM7 and her rmgc data file with a timestamp of 2020.
I’m trying to help her update her family tree.
The Icelandic names use several upper and lower case characters, such as an “o” with 2 dots above. They show up as gibberish on the screen and in the Reports Lists.
Her old printed copy looks fine though.
I found and installed a Google font called Icelandic. After selecting it for screen and lists, it may have fixed a couple of characters but it has an ugly blocky appearance.
On a Microsoft site, a found a list that seems to indicate that “Segoe UI” provides Icelandic, but that’s already the default font in RM7.
My mother turned 100 years old in January. She hasn’t touched the computer for a few years. She can’t provide any info.
Any suggestions?
Unfortunately, the Symbol font made no difference. I quit and restarted RM7 just in case.
RootsMagic definitely supports Unicode fonts. That follows on to how such characters get entered. In Notes, that may involve RM’s Character Map tool (Ctrl-T), Windows’ Character Map facility or actual Alt-key+numerical code combinations. Maybe create a dummy person and experiment with one of those input methods to troubleshoot?
As a support person myself, I know there’s not much worse than trying to help people running old versions. I bought a RM9 license just now and will install it soon.
Much respect for that! And Welcome. Just to inform, everyone here except Renee Zamora are merely users or interested parties of RootsMagic.
I understand your frustration. While RM supports Unicode, getting the font glyphs to display correctly on screen can be very complicated behind the scenes. Most fonts do not contain all 149,186 characters. Instead there are setting for “Fall Back fonts” that are set to display the missing characters. I wish I understood it better myself.
I see the same odd-ball symbol (
for death date on grave) displayed very differently in different apps that have the same display font set.
Is your computer using the US-English locale? Which report are you seeing the problem in? Can you copy some of the characters to your post?
You mentioned o with two dots- do you mean ö and Ö ?
Thanks Kevin and Richard!
RM9 behaves about the same as RM7 (but sure looks different). I found, as I had read here about RM8, that RM9 doesn’t let you pick any font that installed on the machine.
I went into a Note to play with fonts, and the first thing I tried was the Icelandic keyboard that I helped my mother install 20 or 30 years ago. I lets me insert any of the special characters, which persist if I close and open the database. I still need to do some print and PDF tests though.
Looking through the file, family born in Canada after the early 1900’s stopped using these characters. So, I could go through and fix all the names using the ISL keyboard for entry. There aren’t as many as I thought. Her own last name Jónasson is mostly written without the accent on the “o”.
I’m sure my mother must have used this keyboard to enter the names in the first place. A bit of a mystery as to what the problem is. It may be that she entered that data into FTW and later imported it into RM (version 4 most likely).
Anyway, I think I’m good to go. Thanks again!