Under the setup there is a section called “References”. Click on “Index” and a screen appears that enables you to select “No Name Index” and “No Place Index”.
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Just to add a point of consideration to your research…
LibreOffice has a page for daily “releases” that presumably might have changes or fixes that are more recent than the current standard released version:
Index of /daily/libreoffice-25-2/
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@BobC Thank you for that tip Bob. First, in Narrative Report Settings, I tried eliminating just the Place Index, but the RM produced .docx still crashed in LO; however, elimination of both the Name Index and Place Index, the RM produced .docx didn’t cause LibreOffice to crash.
FYI
The formatting of the RM produced .docx when rendered by LibreOffice is still pretty disappointing, particularly when compared side-by-side with the RM produced PDF which does allow the inclusion of the indices.
I’ve just now submitted the bug report.
@kbens0n - Thanks for mentioning this Kevin. I have not tried going to the dailies, or other betas, mostly because I my actual work remains incomplete. Hopefully this thread with everybody’s contributions to it, the numerous crash reports, and the bug report will be enough for LO’s developers to consider addressing the issue.
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Your side by side comparison of RM’s *.docx file and its *.pdf file is the best demonstration I have ever seen of RM’s problem with what I call excessive vertical white space in the *.docx files. The vertical white space problem doesn’t go away just because I use Microsoft Word instead of Libre Office.
I do need *.docx files instead of *.pdf files because I need to edit them. With one exception, I can get rid of the excessive vertical white space fairly easily using Microsoft Word’s global replace to replace things like three successive paragraph marks with two successive paragraph marks and things like that. The exception is that sometimes there are stray and invisible XE entries (index entries) in the middle of the vertical white space. The XE entries are really out of place, and their presence interferes with the global replaces to get rid of the excessive vertical white space. And yes I can make the XE entries visible by clicking on the reverse P icon in the ribbon. But that doesn’t help with the global replaces that need to be done. Where the misplaced XE entries exist, I have to eliminate the excessive vertical white space manually.
It’s a little hard to see in your screen shot, but there is also a problem in the *.docx files where there are stray blanks at the beginning of some lines. For example, your line which starts with Margaret Sumner has a stray blank at the beginning. Those stray blanks are annoying, but I can get rid of them with a global replace.
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@thejerrybryan Yes, the added space at the beginning of paragraphs is annoying, but minor to the page differences in this example: 68 pages in the .docx vs 46 pages in the PDF.
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Here is an example that abounds in RM’s program. Their website advertises that the program is customer friendly. Is it when a quantity is hidden and you must click forward, perhaps in several stages? It is often not possible to guess that there is something more underneath. Maybe you later forget where it was? It may be good enough for those who know the program inside out. The programmers must think more in the normal user’s path. Bring it to light as options so that one can click directly.
The report “Settings” that BobC refers to are all together in a single vertical panel and can be reached either by moving the pane’s slider (on the right) down -or- using the keyboard’s Tab key to cascade downward to the bottom.
I have to say that I think the RM10 report options panel is very difficult to use.
The design does appear to me to be a good faith effort to flatten the user interface and to make the user interface less clicky as compared to the report options window in RM7. But in practice, I think the RM7 report options window was much more intuitive and was much easier to use.
Here are some usability problems with the report options panel.
- Unless you make the report window full screen, the Generate Report button is often off the bottom of the screen. It’s often not obvious that it’s off the bottom of the screen, and no amount of scrolling will will make it appear. I routinely make the report window full screen to avoid this problem. A user may not encounter this problem if they have a large monitor.
- if you make the report window full screen and go to an app other than RM, the report window will usually pop under and lock RM into “bling” mode. The only way to recover on Windows without using the Task Manager to terminate RM is to go through the Alt-Tab dialog to select the RM window. That will pop RM’s report window back on top. I routinely go to apps other than RM from RM’s report window because I save reports as PDF files and view them with my computer’s PDF viewer. It’s a much better way to view reports than it is to use RM’s viewer.
- If you wish to run Descendant Narrative reports, the word “descendant” does not appear in the list of options. It’s very confusing. The list of options for report types under narrative reports should look something like the following.
Report Type
Ancestor
ancestors only
ancestors and children
Decendants register
register (NEHGS)
modified register (NGSQ)
Descendants outline indented
outline indented standard numbering
outline indented Henry numbering
outline indented D’Aboville numbering - Still focusing on Narrative reports, the list of options is much too long. It is trying to cram too much information into too little space. In particular, the Appearance and References options are usually off the bottom of my screen. Yes, the panel is scrollable and you can scroll to see those important options. But it often is not very obvious that there are more options to be seen by scrolling. Plus, scrolling is just clicking in disguise, and scrolling is just as clicky if not more so than actual clicking.
- Again I’m focusing on Narrative reports. In the options for Narrative reports, everything from Date Format down through Strip Brackets needs to be moved into its own sliding panel called Narrative options. Doing so might seem to make the options that were moved harder to see. I think it would make them much easier to see. Plus it would make the options that were not moved much easier to see. It should get rid of the scrolling options altogether. Everything would be visible or would be one slide away.
I’m sure that there are other report options panels that could benefit from similar tweaking. But I think the Narrative report options panel is the report options panel in most need of tweaking.
I wonder if it would be worth your time to try the free Atlantis Word Processor Lite.
You must be mistaking some other version(s). My (Windows 11) laptop for RM is 1920x1080 @ 125% Scaling and it always shows the Generate Report button (fullscreen or not), no matter how much of the Settings pane must be scrolled with the slider or how many options need to be tabbed down through. Actually the button is anchored to the bottom of the window and always visible (even when resizing the window size to much smaller XY dimensions). And, finally, using Ctrl-End key combo lands the user at the very bottom of the options every time.
Your characterization “usually” is an exaggeration, as far as my daily experience goes. Perhaps your experiences are tied to leaving RM idle for significant periods (although I never experience what You describe ) and I run both RM7 & RM10 always and never have this symptom. I pretty routinely have two Edit Person windows open (sometimes all three) and the Publish tab with a report options screen open and Alt-Tab between many open apps (it’s been an OS feature a long time). Additionally, the Windows Taskbar switching also works flawlessly, maintaining RM’s minimized windows (with RM status bar tabs for each) and fully supports the Minimize, Fullscreen (to & from), Exit, Alt-F4, ETC. It can be confusing for some users with multiple Windows apps running and more than one are multi-modal (but I’m more computer savvy than many average users). When multiple programs have several screens/subscreens that the Windows window manager communicates with, it prioritizes and offers a handle to those one can even switch to.
Here is a screen capture of my “no Generate Report button” scenario. As I reported previously, I typically need to make the window full screen to be able to see the Generate Report button.
RM 10.0.5.0 64-bit, font scaling 105
Windows 10 Pro
Version 2009
Installed on 5/28/2021
OS Build 19045.5737
Well, I just showed mine for standard Windows 11 on a tiny laptop screen. I’d look to your system’s display settings or hardware or Win 10 Pro differences. Modes there are a many. Regardless, Ctrl-End would supposedly land you at the bottom (Tabs too). And pane sliders have been around forever.
If anybody is interested, the original posted issue has been addressed, and has been done within a very impressive turn around time, beginning with my report at 13:35:24 UTC and concluding with Xisco Fauli’s committed patch at 18:20:03 UTC. I will wait until this patch arrives in the next stable release that gets pushed, but for anybody that’s interested in trying out the patch in the daily build, it should be available in 25.8.0.
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@thejerrybryan Windows 11 RM 64 bit–just a quick note
Jerry I changed my computer settings to match yours exactly on font scaling, scale and layout and my generate report does show…
So maybe it is a Windows 10 thing-- maybe someone else on Windows 10 could set their computer to the same settings as yours and check it out…
That said I noticed that there is a huge difference in your font setting in the screen capture above and mine
Basically to me, using your settings is the same as setting RM font scaling to 150% except it is the whole computer-- I usually run 1920X1080 and the size of my narrative report would be the same as you have above-- a while back there was some people who couldn’t access buttons when using RM set above 100% on scaling…
Fascinating. That fault was introduced 3-1/2 years ago! But I think there were other faults with RM7 and earlier RTF compatibility that predate it. I don’t know if there would be any correspondence between RTF and DOCX incompatibilities - probably not in RM’s case because the report writer was replaced after RM7.
My RM font scaling is usually 105%. I changed it just now to 100%, and I still see the problem.
Except if I switch to full screen in the RM report screen, I don’t see the problem. In full screen, something forces the Generate Report button always to be visible.
My Windows settings for my screen are all the default ones recommended by Microsoft. I can obviously make screen contents smaller and get more information on the screen. I’m reluctant to do that when I already find a lot of things in RM hard to see. My vision with reading glasses is 20/20, even at my advanced age.
I have Windows 11 and tested various settings and the “Generate Report” button does not disappear. I set the RM font scaling to 150% on both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. I also adjusted the Windows display resolution to 1366 x 768 which was not recommended on my computer and the Generate button remains constant. I don’t have a Windows 10 computer to test on.
This is an interesting conversation, and I really wish it had gone into its own thread instead of forking off from the discussion about Libre Office having trouble reading reading *.docx files created by RM10. It sounds like the Libre Office problem is that Libre Office has a limit of three levels of index in the Place Index and that the Libre Office developers are working on a fix. And of course, the *.docx files produced by RM10 have much excessive vertical white space. That is an RM10 problem, not a Libre Office problem.
In the mean time, it’s becoming apparent to me that different RM users have different experiences sometimes when things on their RM screens are in some sense “hard to see”. When a user with a “hard to see” experience reports it, it can be very difficult to explain to another user who looks at the same RM screen on their own computer and does not find it “hard to see”. We people reporting the problem surely sound like we are just whining. Even when I reported my “hard to see” circles that were invisible to me, and even when I took screen shots of my invisible circles, the “hard to see” circles were not “hard to see” in my screen shots for users looking at my screen shots on their own computers.
It makes the “hard to see” phenomenon very hard to explain. I have tried taking photographs of my screen with my smart phone, but the photos are very grainy and are much poorer quality than I can see with my eyes. I have a new document camera which works great for making scans from pages of books. I’ll going to try laying down my computer screen under my document camera to see if I can get good photos of some of the “hard to see” problems. I don’t have high hopes making better photos of these problems than my smart phone does. It’s probably going to take an old analog camera with real film.