I exported a GEDCOM file from Reunion 14, and imported it into RM 10.0.1. Both the export & import were done on the same MacBook Pro running macOS Sonoma 14.
The issue with the resulting free form sources is that they concatenate the source fields without leaving a space between the fields, so words are running into each other.
Here are some screenshots to illustrate the problem:
Reunion handles sources-citations very differently than any other genealogy program and has a good description under FTM gedcom imports. I personally think their approach is much better but that is not how any other program will do it.
Unfortunately, No. The TEXT tags in your screenshot depict the carriage-return character immediately after the last word (ie. there is no Space characters where You would have liked them to be) between those last words of each line in the TEXT tags and the beginning of the next.
Does the Reunion 14 GEDCOM file have a GEDCOM version number in any of its first few lines?
I’m surprised by the repeated TEXT tags. I expected there to be one followed by CONCatenate or CONTinue tags. It’s as though each TEXT tag contains a value from a different field in the Reunion database. I suppose one could use a text editor having regular expression search and replace to append a space character to every line having the TEXT tag but there may be unwanted consequences.
One reason I’m trying out RM is because of its support for creating source citations & custom templates. One of my (ambitious) projects is to get my sources in better shape, and follow the EE4 guidelines. The other feature I’m interesting in is the DNA match support.
I looked in the Reunion user guide and see the section about FTM. I’ll look at that closely and see if it gives me any ideas for improving the situation.
I thought it might be a bug because I expected RM to add a space between each field it concatenated. And obviously it doesn’t.
I’m thinking of trying to add a space before the return character to the lines that have TEXT tags at the beginning. Using a search & replace with grep/regular expressions, not manually.
Yes, each TEXT tag does contain a value from a different field. This snippet of the GEDCOM is from my second try at the export. For this one I turned on an option called “Flatten structured sources,” and this was the result.
On the first try, without turning on that option, each line had a different tag (that corresponded to different field names. This is what that file contained:
All characters in a payload must be preserved in the corresponding line value, including preserving any leading or trailing spaces. Each line is ended by a line terminator matching production EOL . A line terminator may be a carriage return U+000D, line feed U+000A, or a carriage return followed by a line feed. The same line terminator should be used on every line of a given document. Line values cannot contain internal line terminators, but some payloads can. If a payload contains a line terminator, the payload is split on the line terminators into several payloads. The first of these split payloads is encoded as the line value of the structure’s line, and each subsequent split payload is encoded as the line value of a line continuation pseudo-structure placed immediately following, and with one greater level than, the structure’s line.
The tag of a line continuation pseudo-structure is CONT (p.68). The order of the line continuation pseudo-structures matches the order of the lines of text in the payload. Note — Versions prior to 7.0 had another CONT -like tag, CONC , which split line values without introducing a line break. CONC does not appear in version 7. To support multi-versionGEDCOM parsers, the CONC tag is reserved and will not appear as the tag of a structuretype
So, essentially, it seems like a Reunion oversight to have not used CONT tags and additionally CONC tags apparently are deprecated.
The grep/regexp -or- a multi-line editor could likely work to add trailing spaces (… the TEXT tags seem to possibly only be for SOURCE_RECORD and SOURCE_CITATION structures.)
I don’t think RM supports the import of structured sources into RM templated sources via GEDCOM other than from RM exports because it is based on RM’s own custom GEDCOM tags. So Reunion would have to generate RM compliant GEDCOM matching RM built-in source templates or include in the GEDCOM RM compliant custom template definitions. I doubt that Reunion will ever offer that feature and it would be a tall order for someone to develop a GEDCOM converter. So I think your best bet would be to accept that RM will import the multiple TEXT lines concatenated into free form and work on stuffing in the trailing white space it expects in the GEDCOM.
This may not help but here are 2 old links for reunion gedcom to Family Tree Maker on mac discussing issues and possible fixes. Ben Sayer opened the reunion gedcom in Textedit to do find and replace fixes.
By reading the Reunion user guide GEDCOM section, I learned:
The TEXT tags were used because I turned on “Flatten structured sources.”
The purpose of the “Flatten structured sources” option is to specifically use TEXT tags rather than the individual field tags in a file destined to be imported into the Personal Ancestral File (PAF) app.
I will turn off that option next time I create the GEDCOM.
Thank you! This is a great video, with lots of tips for improving the GEDCOM export from Reunion and cleaning up the GEDCOM file in a text editor for a better import.
