RM Publisher Book Queries

RootsMagic
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1

I have several questions / issues about publishing a book in RM. I’ve described them below as best I can, and would like to hear what anyone else thinks. Is it me, or are these bugs which need squashing?

(1) Default fonts don’t stay as selected. They keep changing back to Times Roman 11pt when other page settings are selected or book contents are edited?

For example : I set the default font on a Narrative Report to Times Roman 15pt Bold Italic, which RM then applied to every chapter in the book. I then added some text into the Subtitle field on the Cover Page and RM promptly changed the whole book back to Times Roman 11pt.

Second example : I changed Text (Narr) in a Narrative Report to Tahoma 10pt, RM applied that to the one other Narrative Report in my book. I then changed the paper size for that chapter from A5 to A4 and RM changed the fonts back to Times Roman 11pt.

Third example : I set the Header for a Narrative Report to Verdana 16pt, then selected another Narrative Report chapter, this said the Header was Times Roman 11pt. I then went back to the original chapter without editing anything and, you’ve guessed it, the Header had reverted back to Times Roman 11pt.

Fourth example : I inserted a new Pedigree Chart into the book, clicked on Generate Book and once again RM changed all my fonts back to Times Roman 11pt.

Why can’t we define default fonts of our own choosing and RM save them?

(2) In fact it’s not only fonts. We should to be able to set a single default layout set - fonts, line spacing, padding etc - which will then automatically apply to all chapters in a book. These settings should then stay in place until changed by the user or unless specifically overridden in the Settings for an individual chapter.

(3) It would seem sensible to use the Title Page to store this uniform layout set (every book must surely have a Title Page).

(4) More detail needs to be added to RM Help to properly explain exactly what margins, padding etc do; it’s not immediately clear what some of these Appearance settings mean. At the moment, trial and error is the only way to understand them but, because RM keeps reverting to its own defaults, that is very time consuming - and extremely frustrating!

(5) Endnotes pages - where each chapter’s Endnotes start, a subtitle of ‘Endnotes’ is automatically inserted. This isn’t very helpful, it should instead show the title of the chapter to which the Endnotes refer (as is conventional in printed books).

(6) Endnote numbering - this doesn’t flow properly. I have a book containing 14 Narrative Reports which are interspersed with 4 Text Pages in different places. After each Text Page the numbering of Endnotes starts again at 1. Again, this makes following references more difficult than it should be.

Thanks.

2

In addition to these settings not being very well defined in RM’s documentation (or not defined at all), some of the names for the settings seem very counterintuitive or just plain wrong. I finally sort of figured out how they worked by saving the report as a *.docx file and opening it with Microsoft Word.

WIthin Microsoft Word, I could then look at Word’s style sheets and understand what the settings in RM really mean. That’s because the settings in RM are transferred very directly in the *.docx file to Microsoft Word stylesheet settings. My biggest problem was with endnotes being double spaced and I couldn’t figure out which RM setting was controlling that until I started poking around in the style sheets in the *.docx file. In my case, the settings called Margin settings for the endnotes in RM were called Paragraph settings in Microsoft Word, which is exactly what I needed to know.

3

Styles and Font setting issues in Publisher have been reported to development.

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4

I only have one test Book report that I have been playing around with in RM9. It may be because I presently only have two chapters and both chapters are narrative reports. But in my case, the endnotes are consolidated without duplication at the end of the Book and there is no issue of them flowing incorrectly. That is exactly what I want.

By contrast, the Book reports that I played around with in RM7 placed endnotes at the end of each chapter, which definitely was not what I wanted. For that reason, I never actually “went production” with Book reports in RM7. I’m probably going to do so with RM9 if my testing continues as well as it has so far.

I gather that with RM9, you are still getting endnotes at the end of each chapter? I don’t see an option that controls the endnote placement was being at the end of each chapter as compared to being at the end of the overall Book.

5

Hi Jerry,
No, I’m not getting Endnotes at the end of each chapter, they are all printed together at the end of the book (as it should be).

My book has 14 Narrative Reports, after the 3rd report is a Text Page where I introduce the people who appear on the next 7 Narrative Reports, then a Text Page describing the final group of 4 Narrative Reports.

But what I’m getting is this:

  1. Endnotes are numbered sequentially referencing the first 3 reports. So far so good. But then the numbering starts again at 1 and follows through for the next 7 reports. It then starts yet again at 1 for the last 4 reports. It seems RM9 ‘s numbering is being confused by my insertion of intermittent Text Pages.

  2. It’s all made worse by the fact that Endnotes don’t recognise the chapter (Narrative Report) titles. Instead the word ‘Endnotes’ is repeated as a sub-title throughout the printed Endnotes pages.

  3. So what I see on the Endnotes pages in respect of chapters 2, 3 & 4 (for example) is:

Endnotes

12 text
13 text
14 text
15 text

Endnotes

16
17
18
19
30
21

Endnotes

1
2
3

It seems to me that each time it says ‘Endnotes’ it should give the chapter title instead and, secondly, the numbering needs to be consolidated into one single series, so (in the example above) numbers 1, 2, 3, should be 22, 23, 24.

I hope this explains it better than I managed before!

Renee, I think this is one for you, please

Steve

6
  • 30 should read 20.
7

On re-reading my earlier reply, I should perhaps make it clear that the Endnote numbers I’ve used in my example - 12, 13, 14 etc - are illustrative (in other words, chapter 1 would account for numbers 1 to 11).

8

Thanks for the clarification. I’ll investigate a little further in my own RM9. My very simplified example presently only has two chapters and both of the chapters are narrative reports. That’s why I don’t see the problem. It sounds like the presence of text chapters is the source of the problem. I’ll see what I can figure out.

9

(5) Endnotes pages - where each chapter’s Endnotes start, a subtitle of ‘Endnotes’ is automatically inserted. This isn’t very helpful, it should instead show the title of the chapter to which the Endnotes refer (as is conventional in printed books).

I have also posted about this a few times—my book consists of family group sheets with each generation in its own chapter. All of the footnotes appear at the end of the book without chapter headings (just the word “Endnotes”). Not having chapter headings makes finding source citations very disturbing!

10

I guess I have to disagree with this one a bit.

My current use case is a report for a family reunion where the report is descendants of one of my sets of great grandparents. I have always just made my report be a single descendant narrative report. This set of my great grandparents had seven children, and I always wanted to use RM’s Book feature instead of a single descendant narrative report.

My concept was a book with eight chapters. Chapter #1 would be a one generation descendant narrative report with just my great grandparents and their children. Then chapters #2 though #8 would be a chapter for each of the seven children, with a descendant narrative report of many generations for each of the children.

What always stopped me from doing this with RM7’s Book feature was the failure of the endnote lists for each chapter to be consolidated. Instead, the endnotes for each chapter were included at the end of each chapter. Many of the citations in my RM database are duplicated across the children, as for example when they were all enumerated in the same census together. Without the consolidated endnotes, my reports would have been many pages more of paper than they already were.

I’m not sure I see the problem with finding footnotes in a consolidated list. If I’m reading along in Chapter #4 and see a footnote superscript of 97, I simply go the the consolidated endnotes and look for endnote 97. I don’t first have to find the footnotes for Chapter #4 and then within that list look for for endnote 97.

I do understand the concept of chapter by chapter endnotes. In fact, I just finished reading a physics book that’s for a general audience that is heavily endnoted and the endnotes are by chapter. But all the endnotes that are by chapter are located at the end of the book. This is very much unlike the case of RM7’s Book feature where the endnotes for each chapter are at the end of the chapter.

In the case of my physics book, to see the citation I first had to go to the back of the book to find the right chapter’s worth of endnotes and then I had to find the correct endnote within that chapter’s worth of endnotes. I’m sure that is the most common publishing convention. But I do think it would have been easier to find the endnotes if they were consolidated into one big list so that if I was looking for endnote 23, all I had to look for was endnote 23 and didn’t first have to find the correct chapter’s worth of endnotes.

Just to further clarify, when I run RM’s reports with endnotes, my report settings for endnotes are:

  • Reuse endnote numbers
  • Don’t use Ibid. (which shouldn’t matter anyway since I’m reusing endnote numbers)
  • Don’t combine citations for a fact.

It’s the “Reuse endnote numbers” setting which is the key to saving tons of paper and for me it’s the key to consolidated endnotes working well rather than having chapter by chapter endnotes.

11

Hi Jerry,

I always appreciate your thoughtful responses—thank you for that!

Just to clarify, my issue is specific to publishing a book that includes chapters with a table, chart and FGS’s…no narrative reports.

Some of my FGS’s have 50+ footnotes. So I totally agree that they should appear at the end of the book. And they do in RM9! It’s just this….

…each FGS has its own unique footnote/endnote numbers and therefore, in the Book feature, they do not run consecutively in a consolidated list at the end of the book. Thus, the Chapter headings, like your physics book, are essential to finding the citations that are cited in the FGS’s.

I hope this makes sense (?).

12

I can confirm your endnote results with FGS chapters in an RM9 book. All the endnotes go to the back of the book but the endnotes are separated by chapter. The results for each chapter are only labeled as Endnotes without any chapter identification. In other words, it’s just as you said.

Just to be sure I was remembering correctly, I recreated my RM9 book where the chapters were narrative reports. In this case, the endnotes for the chapters were combined into a single endnote list and any duplicate endnotes between the chapters had their numbers reused properly. In other words, the endnotes for narrative report chapters are working just like they need to work for my purposes.

So it looks like endnotes are working properly for narrative report chapters but not for FGS chapters. I haven’t tested with text chapters, but I’m confident that text chapters will have the same bug as FGS chapters.

13

So, would this be a feature request or by virtue of this thread a report of a bug in RM9? The original poster, Steve.turner, refers to the same issues in his numbers (5) and (6).

14

I don’t know. I think RM themselves would need to indicate their response.

A case could be made that it’s a feature request because it’s common in publishing for endnotes to be organized by chapter. The consolidation of endnotes for all the chapters into a single list might therefore be considered to be a new feature.

A case could be made that its a bug because of the inconsistency in treating endnotes for narrative chapters (endnotes consolidated across chapters) and FGS chapters (endnotes not consolidated across chapters) and text chapters (endnotes not consolidated across chapters) creates a very awkward set of endnotes for the overall report.

At a bare minimum, if endnotes are not to be consolidated, then they need to be labelled with respect to the chapter with which they are associated.

As a heavy user of narrative reports, I would be very upset if the solution turned out to be that no endnotes were consolidated across chapters. I love the way RM9 currently consolidates endnotes across my narrative chapters.

15

Jerry,

I understand the case you’ve made for this to be a feature request but to my mind it’s a bug. RM9 currently allows a duplication of endnote numbers (as outlined in my comments a few days ago) - and that can’t be right.

Endnotes should be what they’re supposed to be - a consolidated single series of notes at the end of the book.
It’s a bug!

By the way, does it make a difference how an issue like this is defined - bug or feature request? Do you know if RM gives priority to bugs?

Thanks for your interest in this, and Lee’s as well.

Steve

16

I would think that any software author would always prioritize bugs over feature requests that users are clamoring for, but bugs hinder the desired functionality of a program.

17

I have to laugh about that question. I don’t know.

This forum supports a feature request tag on messages and it doesn’t support a bug tag on messages. So I try to work with the system.

And in fairness to RM and to all software vendors in the world, the distinction between a bug fix and an enhancement request is often in the eye of the beholder. Strictly speaking, a bug is something that is not operating according to design specs. So it it is the vendor that has to decide if a behavior described by a user is a bug or not. Only the vendor can make that determination.

Neither I nor any other RM user really knows if the endnotes in RM’s Book feature are behaving according to the design specs or not. It’s like the old joke (and sometimes serious question) - is it a bug or is it a feature? I do think the behavior is very user unfriendly and it makes certain aspects of RM’s Book feature virtually unusable.

18

I agree about it being almost unusable. I’ve just completed a book of 100 pages, with several chapters and text pages. I had to save it to a PDF file, then export it to Word before tidying up all the issues we’ve been talking about recently. I then had to save the finalised version back to PDF format so I could to send it off for printing. A fiddly and time-consuming process, but hopefully I’ll have a hardback book to give my children for Christmas!

Discovering fascinating things about your ancestors and family is all well and good (and RM9 does that pretty well IMO), but we’ve got to be able to publish the results so others can benefit from our many, many hours of hard work. Surely it’s not too much to ask for RM9 to have a workable book system?

At the moment it feels a bit like a car with no wheels, it’s got an engine and lots of buttons to press - but it’s never going to take you anywhere.

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Yes, I reported it a long time ago. Looking at the book files saved data, nothing about fonts is saved. They will have to create saved formatting for each section. Right now all font data is hard coded in the main program so no way to override for each section. Doesn’t seem to be very hard to fix, but understand it is a matter of priorities.
I keep waiting for this change as my book is very long and having to manually change fonts would be a major effort every time I add new people. Long time user of Roots Magic and no other program comes close. Would be nice to at least see my request moving up a published list of development request.