Why do you have commas before the place names?
RootsMagic âdisplaysâ those to hint to users/onlookers that one or more elements of a potential multi-part placename have not been entered, but would be recognized in a scheme for:
placename<-village/town/city<-county/district/region<-country
First observation is that, instead of using fact sentence template language, âŚyou have typed explicit text for the fact sentence.
EDIT:
Mistaken interpretation based on device Iâm using
I did not change the fact sentence. Where would I have âtyped explicit text for the fact sentenceâ? I never changed fact sentence. I am still trying to learn Rootsmagic as I donât think the book sound like a good investment (some cant read the light print)
Apologies, Iâm using a friendâs tablet and it butchered the bottom of the screenshot display because there is some issue showing the Capture bar at the bottom. Sorry.
The Sentence pane lower right can be edited to any text and would only show up for this person as opposed to edits at the Fact List facility which affect all fact holders.
The screenshot with the Birth fact looks correct and it seems to match your report with one exception. The exception is that when looking at the Birth fact, the Birth sentence ends with a period and in the report the Birth sentence ends with a semi-colon. That makes no sense. I canât picture how the period is turning into a semi-colon.
Could you post the same screen capture again except this time with the Marriage fact highlighted? Try to scroll the right hand side of the screen all the way down so we can see everything associated with the sentence for the Marriage face.
Here is the screen shot with marriage highlighted. I am also attaching the customize screen for the marriage. I did not change any of the sentence templates.
Hey everybody! @nkess nailed it earlier. There is no issue with sentence templates, data problems, whatever. What we are seeing for Sure W. is the hard-coded, abbreviated sentence for a child of the primary person in the current Generation who had children and will appear in the next Generation in the report with the templated sentences. The full, templated sentences for ii Active M. Downing are because she had no children and will not be reported in the next Generation block.
Thatâs as designed and has been for decade(s).
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Yep. I feel like an idiot that I didnât notice whatâs going on, even after @nkess pointed it out.
The design of the NGSG and NEHGS reports is such that most people appear twice in a report. They appear for the first time in a list of children of their parents. Then they are carried forward to the next generation where they appear for the second time one generation later as the husband or wife of their spouse and as the parent of their children. The first appearance is not under control of RMâs sentence templates. The second appearance is under control of RMâs sentence templates.
An exception is that if a person has no children or spouse, then they appear only the first time as the child of their parents without being carried forward to this next generation. In this case the sentences for the person actually are under control of RMâs sentence templates.
The result is that the list of children can have some children listed under control of RMâs sentence templates and other of the children listed without being under control of RMâs sentence templates. I think itâs a real mess. And itâs a huge problem if you try to create sentence templates in languages other than English. Thatâs because the sentences for children carried forward to the next generation will still be in English.
As far as the original question, if you look forward to the next generation, then you will see the sentences for the person in the next generation will have been constructed according to RMâs sentence templates.
Thanks Tom. I understand now. There is nothing wrong with my database or the program. Everything has been explained. Thanks to everyone.
I see that you do not have the Description field.
My sentence Template is [couple] <#Couple#was|were> married< [Date]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>. [Desc]
You should go to the fact of marriage and change the template. At the same time, you should check the other facts and ad [Desc]
Maybe Iâm not understanding what you are saying, BUT I have multiple databases where I have used only states/ countries or county and state â there was only one time that I had a comma before the city name because I evidently added it-- ie
, Cleveland, OH â probably because I had originally had an address or cemetery name in the place field, then changed the cemetery/ street to place details and missed the comma
I donât use any commas for missing items but I have very few USA places in my database. This article explains the principle.
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Hi
Just a note. I use the comma to note missing places as city and county. I do use Legacy Family Tree at times and have been trying to use Rootsmagic 9. Legacy gives me a choice to remove the leading commas when printing a report so was using them for my information to see missing places. Removing commas in a report looks nicer in the reports. I wish Rootsmagic had the ability to remove leading commas. Thanks again for all the comments.
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It does, if you put them inside the conditional < > angle brackets.
This wiki page (RM8 but still applicable) is helpful âŚ
http://wiki.rootsmagic.com/wiki/RootsMagic_8:Sentence_Template_Language
If the leading commas are in the place name, O doubt the Sentence Template Language has any switch that can remove them. If the Abbreviation field is filled with the no-extraneous-commas name, then the Place:Abbrev modifier could be used for a cleaner look in the narrative. However, that option is unavailable in any other type of report, to the best of my recollection.
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In my experience, the only practical way to get place names to look the way I want them to look in RMâs reports is to enter them the way I would want them to look in reports. As Tom indicated, the utility of the Abbreviated place name is very limited.
For that reason, I never do the comma-comma thing because thatâs not the way I want place names to look in reports. And I always include place types such as County, Parish, and Township in place names because thatâs the way I want them to look in reports.
I think that there needs to be a place name standard where place names are are entered something like Country = United States, State = Tennessee, County = Hamilton, City = Chattanooga. I suppose this could be done by counting commas, but then you are limited to just country, state, county, and city. Also, this particular set of place types is very United States centric and is not adequate for many countries in the world. The existing standard doesnât even include Townships in the United States and certainly doesnât include things like Townlands in Ireland and similar place types in many other countries. So I would prefer the keyword approach.
Then there should be universal place templates for displaying the place names. I definitely would not want to see the keyword form of place names in reports. For example, my place template would look something like the following.
<[City]><[County] County><[Parish] Parish><[State]><[Country]>
Except that I would need some sort of smart way to insert or not insert commas as needed and I would need some sort of value switch to omit the Country name in some cases, like if all the place names in a report were United States or if all the place names in a report were Ireland. Which is to say, I donât want to see Atlanta, Georgia in a report if I only know itâs the city of Atlanta and I donât know which county. And I want to see Atlanta, Fulton County, Georgia in the report if I do know the county, and want to see Fulton County, Georgia in reports if all I know is the county and I donât know the city.
This is only a concept and itâs not fully worked out. For example, some users might prefer to see State of Tennessee rather than just Tennessee or Commonwealth of Kentucky rather than just Kentucky. Some Canadian provinces donât have counties, and I never want to see comma-comma in reports anyway. Etc.
Seems like the Fact Type templates need the flexibility of adding additional fields, and having those fields recognized / usable in corresponding sentence template.
Then you could define the desired location fields to your needs, structure the sentence to conform to your writing style, and use the sentence template language to control whether commas appear when data is in one of the fields.
It would allow for globalization too. As @thejerrybryan mentioned, not every place uses the same geographic boundary structures. With a flexible fact type system, you could design a Residence_US fact, a Residence_Ireland or a Residence_Mars template as needed.
And not applicable to all places in the US. For instance St Louis Missouri is not in a county. It is an independent city as are quite a few in the US.
You could handle St. Louis âcorrectlyâ by counting commas, but doing so would lead you to Saint Louis,Missouri - which is just so wrong. The state that has the most independent cities is Virginia, for example, Richmond, Virginia. But as you say, independent cities are all over. And I like the example of Canadian provinces that donât even have counties as a good argument against counting commas.