I am struggling to complete my book project. Is there a tutorial in adjusting header and footer settings, specifically the horizontal lines that you can create at the top and bottom on the text sections? It is not obvious and when I was trying out side of my project to test changes in a separate narrative report, it changed all of the defaults in my project and I could not figure out how to get back to my old settings! Thank you.
The RM10 Help page for Report Settings covers the different areas.
I am using Roots Magic 9. Is there any way to find out what the default settings are so I can restore them? It seems my project has been “corrupted”.
Even if I try and create a new book completely, the header, footer and fonts are all “messed up”!
I believe if you create a new blank database and add a single person to it, it should have the default settings for Publisher. Keep in mind that the styles and fonts are universal for the whole book.
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I have seen messed up settings before. In my case it was the layout of various charts (Box, Ancestors, Descendants were some). Didn’t seem to matter what I did – it was not go back to “normal”. Not sure if windows or driver update may have causes this. One Solution I found did work – install on new computer (the flash driver option might also work). Use copy of same database. My issue seems to be in the program default settings (of reports) vs the settings with the actual database. Not sure that will help in your case but worth a try. What I can say it similar reports have occurred in past. I can not reproduce it on demand so I am not sure how it occurs. It would be nice to have an option in tools … something line "Reset all Report Settings for (or by category such as Header /footers)
Thank you, this did work so I could see the default settings. I took screenshots and when I went back to my publisher project,I could change things back to the default settings BUT THEY WOULD NOT HOLD!
I am not sure if I can even do this, but I was thinking about creating a new data base from my back up, and chapter by chapter try recreating my book. This will take hours and I am not really sure if that would work or not.
I am so disappointed with Roots Magic. There is obviously a “glitch” in their software.
Thank you; at least I know I am not crazy; I was not even working on my book when the changes took place. I was working with a “dummy data base” to test out setting changes, but the changes carried over to my main data base and book anyway. This is clearly a problem that Roots Magic needs to address.
the task to fix a problem is quite challenging when it can not be replicated.
I have tried and have not been able to. If you are able to determine the steps then “fixing it” is highly more likely. I know I probably sounded crazy when I reported 2 years ago – I tried numerous suggestions. The different computer (same version software & same database) was what was a work around. Both computers were Windows 10 (though one was pro and the other was not). I suppose a corrupt setting could cause it – but from I saw at the time it was not a setting in the Database or that should have carried to computer #2.
I thought I may have gotten things back to “normal”, but my book is now 200 pages longer and over the limit for my publisher. This is a big project, was 900 pages now 1100. It has to be under 1000 pages for the publisher. I looked at a few pages and they seemed to match my prior saved PDF. I am going to have to go through page by page and see what is going on. What a hassle.
And by the way, I can reproduce the problem, but I will not do it again on my data base or a dummy data base. All I have to do is go into a single narrative report and change the header and footer settings and it throws off the spacing. Even just opening up the header section of the narrative report and not making changes at all causes the settings to change.
I seem to have the book looking “normal” on publisher. When I save to the PDF file, I have 834 pages which is fine.
When I save as a docx which I need to get clearer images and clean a few things up, the page total jumps to 1082! Before I had the problem with fonts and header/footers, the docx file was 925 pages which was under my publisher’s 1000 page maximum.
There are no duplicate pages or photos; the conversion to the docx is just totally different now.
I am at a loss of what to do. I really do not want to cut out content. This just does not make sense.
Check the margins, fonts and paper size in Word.
The margins, font and paper size settings in word match the settings in RM, but the amount of information on each page, particularly the narrative reports is less than on the PDF, and the paragraphs are more spread out than before I had the header footer problem in publisher.
I am so confused.
In Word, try checking the paragraph settings when you have Normal style selected. (See attached.)
Word’s default setting for line spacing is Multiple at 1.08, which adds a little bit of space after each line within the paragraph.
I usually change the paragraph setting for the Normal style to Single which eliminates this extra space.
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I just ran a Narrative report on my database. I saved as a pdf and had 45 pages. I saved as a Word doc and had 48 pages with lots of added white space. I then opened my pdf and exported from that to Word. Came out at 45 pages. I think it is a word issue. Looking at the word doc there are a lot of extra line breaks that I don’t see when I export from pdf. You might want to try that to get your book under the page count you need.
I must have a different version, but I found a similar setting and I did get the page count down. I still need to “knock out” 30 more pages to get under 1000. Thank you!
I agree it is something with Word but the problem “got worse” when I had the setting change problem in Roots Magic. The reason I am even converting to Word in the first place is because my photos were blurred on the PDF created from RM but clear on the Word document created from RM.
In order to get the clear photos, I have to create the Word document from RM, and then convert the word document back to a PDF for the publisher I am working with to print the book. There is no change in any of the layout when I go from docx to PDF, only when I go from RM PDF to RM docx.
Have you checked the heading settings in Word? That could also make a big difference
Can you just create the PDF substituting Transparent or white graphic files to reserve their placement/orientation, then export from PDF to Word and overlay the placeholders with the photos.
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Thank you, that sounds like an interesting option. I am not an expert in any of this and I would not even know where to begin!