I am creating a narrative report for distribution to family members. I am exporting to Word so I can clean up spacing and other issues. I don’t mind the report changing a name to a pronoun but other changes are frustrating.
Here is one example. This is the Residence Fact sentence format: [Person] lived< [Date]>< at [PlaceDetails:plain]>< [Place]>. Notice it does not include description [Desc] however in the narrative report the description is dropped right in the middle of the sentence completely screwing up the sentence in the report.
Another example is the addition of extra propositions specifically “at” and “in.” My report is about 80 pages. That’s a lot of editing! If I make a change in the data and re-print the report, I will have to redo the editing.
In some cases, I’ve edited the Fact Sentence to get what I want but that does not work in all cases. What are others doing to clean up narrative reports?
If you edited it from the Edit Person screen then the edit only applies to the sentence for the individual.
If you edited it for the Role on the Fact Type List, the the edit will apply globally for that fact.
The default for the sentence on the Fact Type is
[person] lived< [Desc]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>< [Date]>.
The issue of the prepositions and how to control them is covered in the Help entry for Sentence Template Language. Again, the use is determined on where you edit their use.
I don’t have enough detail to answer all your questions. But do be assured that most of the problems you are describing are solvable.
One key concept is that by default many of RM’s sentence template variables are “smart variables” that provide their own prepositions. Therefore, if you create sentences that include prepositions, there is a good chance you will get double prepositions. The way to make RM’s template variables not to be “smart” is to qualify them with the :Plain option, for example [Place:Plain] rather than just [Place].
I have done extensive editing of all of RM’s sentence templates to get them to look the way I wish. And I do some very extensive editing of my reports with Word before printing to paper. But my editing with Word only has to do with what I call white space - extra space between paragraphs that shouldn’t be there, extra blanks at the beginnings of lines that shouldn’t be there, and that sort of thing. So as a sample size of 1, it is possible to get my reports to look the way I want without editing the text with Word. The main thing is that you have to decide who is in charge of prepositions - you or RM. It can’t be both.
I can’t explain the problems you describe with the [Desc] variable without more details. Can you give an example of a sentence where the [Desc] variable is not in the template and the Description field prints out anyway? In my decades of printing reports from RM, I have never seen the behavior of the [Desc] fail. I do have cases where for good and valid reasons I enter data into the Description field but I keep it from printing by omitting the [Desc] variable from the sentence template.
Not to muddy the water, but my sentence templates are extremely simple and never include prepositions or verbs or pronouns, and each person’s name only appears one time. My sentences are called point-form sentences. You can see an example at Sample RM Narrative Report with Point-Form Sentence Templates This was all done with RM’s sentence templates and notes, not with post -processing in Word. Truly the only thing I do in Word is clean up excessive white space.
Weird, I can’t reproduce the issue of data [Desc] appearing in the narrative report when the data was not in the sentence. I will have to see if it occurs again.
I’ve been hesitant to change the default sentence structure but now see that is probably the right course of action if I plan on distributing narrative reports. I have customized sentences but of course they only apply to that one occurrence.
Funny, I am a long time RM user but have rarely printed anything out so I have not paid attention to sentences nor learned how to work with them. I better get busy.
I probably misinterpreted your question. My apologies. When I think of “customizing” sentences, I tend to think of customizing the sentence templates so that, for example, customizing the sentence for the Death fact results in customizing the sentence for every Death fact in your database. But as you pointed out, sentences can also be customized on a case by case basis.
My sample report was produced by customizing the sentence templates. That’s why I answered in the way that I did.
Reports printed on paper have long been a major focus of my work because I distribute printed reports at family reunions. I like publishing online as well, but it seems to me that printed reports are likely to survive long past my lifetime, whereas that which I publish online is not. So I think it’s good to take the extra time to make printed reports be as good quality as possible.