The idea of using the keyboard Enter key to input carriage returns is indeed very simple and it works well with RM’s facts and notes. However, you do have some decisions to make.
- Carriage returns can be included in RM’s notes or in RM’s sentence templates or both. For your particular use case, I suspect that you are going to want to put the carriage return at the beginning of the note and not in the sentence template. But that is something you would need to play around with to see which way of doing it best meets your needs. Also, see the the next bullet point about there being two “notes” for each fact.
- Each RM fact can actually have two “notes”. The first “note” is the Description field and is a short note, limited to about 100 characters. RM supports a [Desc] variable for this short “note” in the Sentence Template Language. The second “note” is the actual note. It is unlimited in size but there is no [Note] variable. Instead, RM places the Note text after all the other text that’s defined in the sentence template for the fact. So if you decide to use both “notes”, you have decide whether to put a carriage return at the beginning of the first note or the second note or in the sentence template itself.
- For the most part, the simplest thing to do is not to use the Description field and to put the carriage return at the beginning of the actual Note field. Otherwise, if you put the carriage return at the end of the sentence template and if it turns out that there is not a note for a fact, you will get an ugly blank line in your report.
- However, I have a few fact types that are only note text with no other data. This is a common practice among RM users. I call my fact which is only a note the Narrative fact, but the name of the fact doesn’t really matter. In any case, the citation superscript for a fact in reports comes after the sentence template text and before the actual Note text. That looks very unprofessional in reports when the only data for a fact is the Note. Actually, it looks just horrid. So for my normal facts, I pretty much don’t use the Description field and for my facts which only contain note I do use the Description field. I put sort of a short introductory sentence into the Description field and the main body of the note text into the Note field. Doing it that way makes it look fairly professional in reports because the citation superscript comes after the short introductory sentence.