Before I acquire RM, I would like to know if it offers the functionality I need. The free version of RM has such limited capabilities that I cannot find out for myself.
I want a genealogy program that:
a) Can provide both English and Dutch output.
b) Is able to produce a report of only the male line, where the female children and their wives are still shown, but their descendants are no longer mentioned in the report.
c) The report can be produced in RTF, DOC or ODT, where the formatting uses, among other things, paragraph styles, so that it can be adjusted in the text editor at once.
d) The numbering of the individuals is constructed from n = n + 1. (The oldest ancestor starts at 1. His children are then numbered 2, 3 and so on.)
Is all this possible with RootsMagic? Does anybody know?
[a] The program accepts Unicode characters, so whatever entries you make, template-based sentences you create, etc would show up in the language you used. However, the program itself isn’t multi-language compliant, meaning (a) you can’t change the interface language & (b) reports where the headings etc are programmaticly determined are always in English. Example: if you print out a calendar report, you could specify the calendar title in Dutch, but all the month and day names remain English.
[b] Not certain I understand the objective. And usually a descendant list report with either be a direct line listing (oldest person down to a specified person with all extraneous people omitted) or a full descendancy that shows all persons.
[c] Reports can be saved as DOCX, PDF and TXT. ODT, such as used in LibreOffice, isn’t offered (though I wish it was too). Graphic reports, like a fan chart, can be saved as PDF or SVG.
[d] I don’t use numbering so can’t answer this one.
You might spend some time browsing the Online Documentation site. It will help you get a better sense of the capabilities.
Hi Kimberly,
Thank you for your answer.
a) The language for the UI is no problem, but for the report itself is…
b) I have a very big database with the oldest person born about 1460. My report is abouw all people who share the same family namen. The report is abouw 300 pages. If I was to include all decendents it would simple be too mutch. So the report shoul follow only the family namen.
c) Not only the format type is inportant, but also the way the document build. e.g. indenting can be done by tables, spaces or tabs in combination with a paragraph style. Only the last option offers the possibility to adjust the style after cutting and pasting in the word processor. A layout with spaces or tables must be adjusted per element. This involves thousands of adjustments.
It is clear to me that this program is not suitable for me.
Thanks
You can create Dutch sentence templates in RM. But there would be some problems.
- Not all aspects of RM’s narrative reports are under control of sentence templates. The first sentence for each person is under control of the sentence template for the person’s first fact, which is usually the Birth fact. So far, so good. But the first sentence for the person’s spouse is not fully under control of the template. It includes additional information about the spouse’s parents that would be in English.
- RM’s sentence templates include a number of “smart” variables such as [Date] and [Place] which expand by default not just to the date and place but which also add appropriate extra words which are usually prepositions, e.g., died “in Knox County, Tennessee” where the “in” is added for you. The smart text is in English only. You can turn the smart text off by making the sentence template say things like [Date:plain] and [Place:plain]. But then you would have to be very careful in your template definitions to include any extra needed words. I use point form sentences which turn off the smart variables completely, even though my reports are in English. So my sentences read something like the following. This format would surely work well in Dutch. Just use the Dutch word for Birth, etc.
Birth: 12 Jan 1901, Knox County, Tennessee.
- Not all aspects of RM’s narrative reports are under control of sentence templates. RM supports the register and modified register formats which would provide you a numbering which is similar to or maybe even identical to that which you need. But in these formats, there is a summary list of children for each family and the summary list does not use sentence templates and therefore is in English.There are a number of outline type formats that don’t have the list of children for each family. But none of the numbering schemes for the outline formats would meet your needs
- I think there is enough control over headers and footers to render them all in Dutch.
- You can have English sentence templates or Dutch sentence templates, but not both. RM supports only a single set of sentence templates. Switching back and forth would be major work.
I know that there are several genealogy software packages that say they support multiple languages, including for reports. I have never investigated any of them because all my work is in English. But I have always been dubious of how well they might be able to produce reports in several languages because the problem is very daunting if it is to be solved properly.
This is not a feature that is built-in to RM, but it might be possible to accomplish with a good bit of work. What you would have to do would be to create a temporary database from your main database containing only the desired people, and then run your report in the temporary database.The tricky part would be selecting the people to copy to the temporary database. I don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out how to accomplish it unless you were quite serious about giving it a try.; I might have to use a little SQLite coding to make it happen. SQLite is RM’s underlying database platform.
I’m sorry about that, but certainly understand. It’s too bad the demo version of RootsMagic is feature-limited instead of time-limited.
If you’re not already aware of it, you might have a look at the GRAMPS package as an alternative. It’s FOSS and internationalized, so might better support your multi-lingual needs.
That’s true. But the results are reasonable. Translating just words doesn’t make much sense. You’ll have to translate whole sentences.
That’s very kind of you. But because there are other points that RootsMagic does not provide, it makes little sense to me. Furthermore, the chance is too great that if I were to acquire the full version, other points would come up. I cannot test that now because various functionalities do not work.
Gramps does indeed have an ODT output with paragraph styles. But the user interface is not very user-friendly. It also has no options (as far as I know) to select a male line. Aldfaer has built in the selection of the male line by default. That works very well. You can also select a female line. But that program has no option to create an ODT report.
Maybe you need to search for a software that can convert its output to ODT.
Since RM does not meet your needs, there’s no further help to be found here. If you do find a solution, some of us might like to know.
Ah! I see you’re a master of understatement, lol. Before coming to RootsMagic, I considered Gramps. Dealbreakers for me were the lack of direct Ancestry integration and the graphical reports, particularly the fan chart, looked very amateurish.
Since DOCX can be opened by LibreOffice and saved as ODT, maybe that’s not too onerous for you on that requirement?
RM isn’t particularly expensive at USD 39.95 / € 38.99. Even if you discovered other things that weren’t perfect, it wouldn’t be too expensive to give it a try. That’s what I ultimately did. RM definitely frustrates me in certain ways, but it’s workable so I’ve continued with it thus far.
One of the best aspects of RM is actually right here … the Community. There are some fantastic folks here with deep knowledge of the software, including the inner workings. For example, Jerry talked about the SQL underpinnings and how something might be done by bypassing the UI. You might discover that RM meets most of your needs directly and the rest can be accomplished through another means.
Side note: I don’t work for RM, so I’m not trying to convince you to stay so much as I’m trying to help you consider from all angles before you depart.
Side side note: I have ancestors with the surname Van De Bogart. Though I haven’t traced them back to Europe yet, I’m pretty sure they were Dutch. Thus my continued engagement on your post … to understand in case it becomes relevant to my search too!
Hi Kimberly,
Yeah, DOCX, ODT or even RTF would do the trick, but only if the document RootsMagic create uses paragraph styles. I don’t know if that is the case. But even so… I need a Dutch translation. It is to mutch work to translate it by hand, every time I update my document. Perhabs in a few years when RootsMagic has evolved further.
So about Van de Bogart… most likely Dutch. There are some of them in my family tree on my mothers side. If you want I could do a quick survey for you. Share the info you have on them. Maybe it’s enough to make a connection with the Netherlands.
I have no personal need for reports in languages other than English, but I am curious and interested in such things. So I was just now been looking at a couple of software packages for which I have licenses and that do support reports in languages other than English. I could be wrong, but it appears to me that they are not accomplishing this with sentence templates but rather they are doing the equivalent of translating English sentences to other languages - sort of vaguely like Google Translate.
I could be wrong, and those of you who may have experience with such software please correct me if I’m wrong. But if that is what is happening, I think it’s pretty wrong headed. I think it would be much better to support sentence templates for multiple languages.
In RM terms, it seems to me that means several things.
- Every aspect of reports needs to be under control of sentence templates. There shouldn’t be any dangling loose ends that have to be post-processed. As of RM 10.0.3.0, there are aspects of RM’s narrative reports that are not under control of sentence templates, and it drives me crazy sometimes.
- There should be multiple sets of sentence templates from which you can choose. It would be similar to the way there are now multiple color sets. You should be able to run a report using English templates and immediately thereafter turn the same report using French templates (or templates from any other language).
- By doing it with sentence templates, there might be different sets of French templates and different sets of Dutch templates, etc. Even right now, there are times I might like to have two different sets of English templates from which to choose. I can change the templates for a bunch of different facts, but then I have to change them all back. Doing so is not even remotely practical.
- The templates should be fully exportable and importable. There are some little discussed limitations on exporting and importing RM’s sentence templates where you cannot import sentence templates that change the sentence text for built-in facts.
I second this for sure. And if those templates also included robust type-setting, I bet it would give @7slaper the paragraph style flexibility they needed.
@rzamor1 … could you review this thread and consider adding a Feature Request to the docket?
Confirming requests have been reported to development.