I’ve poked around under styles and reviewed the Help section. It doesn’t appear that there is a setting that can be configured to put a little space above and/or below each fact entry. (It’s possible to config the spacing of all lines collectively but that spreads things out a bit much.)
If you save the report to a .DOCX file, you can see that the facts are in a row/column cell grid. Certainly from there you can tinker in your favorite editor.
But it would be peachy if we could adjust inter-Fact spacing from inside of RM.
I can think of a couple of ways to do that:
Provide toggles to insert a blank line above and/or above the text within the cell. (It could pick up the style setting to be the same font size.)
Insert blank grid rows between each fact. A slide setting could be used to control how “thick” the blank row was.
Please, could something like this be added to the backlog of Features?
This may not be as simple as it would appear. RM uses a third party library to generate any DOCX and PDF formats. As such it is going to depend on how these libraries deal with the text sent to them. For example, it may truncate any leading or trailing whitespace. Several years back, I worked on a project that generated data into a PDF of DOC file and encountered limitations in the library that did not let me format the data as I wished. We started the search for a new library that would, but I don’t know how that turned out as I had left the company by then.
I, for one, would like a little more control over appearance in things such as the narrative reports because some of them are a little hard on the eyes too.
I remember Bruce blogging the fact that he and Michael had written their own PDF-handling library, for RootsMagic’s recent versions, so it would seem there might be a chance for enhancements beyond third-party limitations. We’ll have to see.
Lol, with RM nothing is. I appreciate your insights. (pun intended).
Fingers crossed then! With a lot of RM users, and family genealogists in general, being a bit further along on the timeline of life maybe this request will resonate with the developers.
If the facts are in tables (grid roes) you can right click inside the table and choose Table Properties. On there just add padding to the cells. Just a few pixels or .2 of an inch should work. Just play with the measurements until it looks right.
This isn’t possible inside RM. (I know because I’ve tried.) If you’re talking about doing it within an exported DOCX file, I already know / mentioned that technique. It’s not the Feature Request I’m making.
I don’t recall them saying that. I do seem to recall saying they were writing their own report generator though. If one were to use the correct software to walk through and decompile the RM executable, I think one might find calls to what appears to be third party libraries. Not that I would do such thing and violate my license terms of course.
I tried them while exploring for a solution. But when I saw the example text window, it looked like it was cutting things off rather than adding space. So … I didn’t actually run the report that way.
But bingo that’s the solution I was looking for!! Thank you very much for the pointer to the solution. My eyes are grateful!
For anyone else who reads this thread later, below is a screen cap of the results for a compare / contrast with the 1st capture above …
if we could adjust inter-Fact spacing from inside of RM.
With a lot of RM users, and family genealogists in general, being a bit further along on the timeline of life maybe this request will resonate with the developers.