RM8 - Apparently no choice of fonts?

RootsMagic
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I believe I saw this in another post, but it appears there’s only ONE FONT available in RM8, and that’s it. In doing notes, especially, I used a fixed-with font in transcribing census listings, so the columns would line up. RM8 has only a proportional font, as I discovered when I converted one of my larger files and began prowling through the new version.

What program in this day and age doesn’t allow you to use any Windows font you happen to have on your machine?

Mike

3 Likes
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I cannot answer this as I am also having the same problem, if I enter the data or copy and paste, it uses the default font, which you cannot satisfactory make neat columns. When you produce a Narrative Report you can change the font, however, it does not create neat columns.

So fully support emkaysmith.

Bob

1 Like
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Being unable to specify a mono-spaced (fixed-space) font in fact Notes, especially facts for censuses, has been a major issue for me since I purchased RM7, as the Narrative Reports are what I use most frequently for both reviewing my data entries and my final printed output for family members. In the past I’ve even made ugly kludges with tags in my Notes field to post-process the RM7 output RTF files, but I never had time to fully automate. Instead, several years ago I decided to wait on RM8, certain that would be a new RM8 feature (likely a tag <mono> or <fix> similar to <b> or < i>). I beg it will be in a future RM8 release now that RFT is likely gone forever.

Edit: the initial post 'implemented the tags, had to escape them

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Hi Gjohn,
I know this forum is really intended for RM8 and the queries we have, however RM7 is being mentioned in comparison where some of the facilities are not (as yet) available.
Like you I used a fixed space font (Courier) in my notes and reports as it makes the columns of data neat.
In RM7 we could go to Tools>Program Options>Display, then you could change the fonts, which would then become the default ones.

With RM8 it is a fixed font in the Notes, and for the Narrative Report, you can actually change the font, because the note font is different it does not produce very good columns, then when you come out of the work, the fonts go back to the programs default ones.

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Hi Bobs,
I concur with your post, but that is for ALL fact Notes. I wasn’t clear in what I was trying to accomplish. In the Narrative Reports (which I often print and I share with family), within the larger report I wanted to be able to mix fixed & proportional width character in specific notes or within a note (either one), not all notes. Here are two possible implementations for RM8:

  1. When a custom fact-type is defined, have a pull-down to specify the font to be used. i.e. Times New Roman, Courier New. This would allow me to create a custom census or register fact that had fixed-spaced characters in the Notes. Other fact types could be configured using easier to read a serif font.
  2. Expand to the existing template language tags already supported in the Notes. Add a new one to specify monospace/fixed-width (an example, similar to the HTML <i> tag for italics </i> within the note text, this is how I kludged it in the past).
    Either way, I’m committing to RM8 for the many other improvements.

This discussion prompted me to do some testing. I found in all Narrative Report outputs small caps in docx/pdf and italics in docx did not work correctly, but bold, underline and sub/superscripts did. Screen display were mostly correct. Reported specifics in email to technical support.

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Hi Gjohn
Thanks for your reply, you were going deeper into producing your reports, and can see now how frustrating the current restrictions must be. I appreciate your comments, food for thought.

I have hit another problem in that RM7 gave us the facility to enter notes as either Personal or Family, I can only see the Personal notes in RM8 yet the family notes show up in a Narrative report, no idea where they are so cannot edit them!

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