As a new user, test-driving RM8 on my Mac, one of my main frustrations is the (rich?) text editor.
For one thing, the text editor doesn’t like me using the arrow keys. When highlighting text with the keyboard as I am used to doing, any time I hold down an arrow key to select text in a given direction, it makes one of my system’s default “error” tones for each characted selected as it goes. It doesn’t make the error sound if I repeatedly press the arrow key in the desired direction, but that isn’t in my typing muscle memory. So it’s an annoyance.
The text editor behaves strangely when handling formatting. From my GEDCOM import, a lot of the formatting in my sources became HTML tags somewhere in the process. In the Edit Source window,some of these HTML tags render as the desired format in the little preview pane at the bottom (with the “Customize” link in the header bar). Others appear as little character-set error symbols, like the black diamond with a “?” in it. If I click in the field of the Master Source to fix these, I see <em>
tags for italiced text, and often fragments of the ASCII code where quotation marks should be. If I take out the latter and replace them with quotation marks, the text editor turns the quotation mark and the word to the right of it blue and underlines it, as if it were a hyperlink. Speaking of hyperlinks, when I type in a URL in the appropriate place of a new citation, it ultimately becomes invisible in the text editor window, e.g.
FamilySearch ([blank spaces corresponding to the number of characters in the URL] : accessed 23 October 2021)
However, if I go back out of the text editor and look at the little preview window, there’s the URL right where I typed it, looking normal.
Also, the text editor window sometimes ends up hiding bits of my text from me, as though the line of text hasn’t wrapped. Again, whatever is hidden usually appears normally in the preview pane once the text editor is closed.
One bit of formatting which the RM8 text editor lacks is superscript. Superscript is commonly used to indicate generation numbers in my text, e.g., lots of journal article titles have superscript generation numbers in them. The ones in my imported GEDCOM sources show up in the text editor with <sup>
tags around them, but if I leave the tags there the superscript characters sometimes render correctly in the source preview.
Edited to add: Also, the text editor often unexpectedly jumps my cursor down to the end of my existing text.
Also, just now, I tried fixing the formatting of a Master Source footnote in the text editor, then went back out to the previous screen and the “Footnote” field text showed up like this:
<FONT face=".AppleSystemUIFont" style="font-size:14pt" color="#000000">Holy Trinity Church (Dorchester, Dorset, England), Parish Register, 1559–1653, ; digital images, "Parish registers for Holy Trinity Church, Dorchester, 1559<FONT face=".AppleSystemUIFont" style="font-size:14pt" color="#000000">–<FONT face=".AppleSystemUIFont" style="font-size:14pt" color="#000000">1974," <em>FamilySearch </em>(<A href="http://www.familysearch.org">http://www.familysearch.org <FONT face=".AppleSystemUIFont" style="font-size:14pt" color="#000000">: accessed 20 July 2019); citing PE/DO (HT): RE 1/1, Dorset Record Office, Dorchester.