This will be the first year I have used RM8/9/10 instead of RM7 to produce a printed family history for a family reunion. Because I have continued using RM7 for so long, it’s actually RM10 rather than RM8 or RM9 that I’m using for the first time for my family reunion report.
There is a problem with using RM10 in that it loses all italics from my report. The italics are important, for example, because names of books and names of newspapers are supposed to be in italics. But I decided to go ahead and use RM10 this year rather than reverting to RM7. Hopefully, the italics problem will be solved by next year.
There have been some interesting challenges. With RM7, I created the report and saved it as an *.rtf file. Then, I did some editing, first with a text editor and then with Microsoft Word, to improve the appearance of the report before printing. With RM10, I created the report and saved it as an *.docx file. Then, I did some editing with Microsoft Word to improve the appearance of the report before printing. So superficially, I used the same process with RM10 that I had used with RM7. The challenges were primarily that using a text editor that supports regular expressions with an *.rtf file is a much more powerful editing tool than is using Microsoft Word with an *.docx file because Microsoft Word lacks support for regular expressions. But except for the italics problem, I was mostly able to make do.
The overall process is the same either way. I make a copy of my database to use as a reporting database. By having a reporting database, I can make some needed tweaks to the database before printing without needing to backup or restore my production database. After creating my report, I can simply delete my reporting database and my production database remains unchanged.
The report ends up with a few cases where a line begins with a blank that shouldn’t be there. These blanks were easy to remove from an *.rtf file using a text editor which supported regular expressions. I have not been able to find a similar way to remove these blanks from an *.docx file using Microsoft Word. My solution is to add the characters qq to the beginning of my sentence for the Birth fact, which is where the extra blank appears. I only do this in the reporting database, not the production database. Then I use Microsoft Word to replace _qq with nothing (the underscore is really a blank), followed by replacing qq with nothing. This has the practical effect of removing the unwanted blank. The qq is just a trick to make it easy to find the blank that needs to be deleted.
I use the NEHGS format for a descendant narrative report. This lists people by family and by generation. It creates a list of children for each family, and a child is carried forward to the next generation only if that child has either a spouse or else has a child of their own. However, sometimes a person has much more data than is convenient or aesthetic to show in the list of children, even if the person has no spouse or children of their own. I therefore use a trick to get such people to be carried forward to the next generation. Namely, I link all such people to a dummy child in my production database. This creates a “family” for the person I want to be carried forward which consists of a null spouse plus the dummy child. Then in the reporting database, I use SQLite to delete the dummy child while still leaving the person with the null spouse. The null spouse is sufficient to get the person carried forward to the next generation. SQLite has to be used because if I delete the dummy child with RM it also deletes the family with the null spouse.
I run the NEHGS report with the following options.
Specify a large number of generations to include all the newest births in the family. There will be lots of living people in the report and everybody wants to see their latest grandchildren listed.
Start with my great grandfather who is the common patriarch for the people at the reunion.
Hardwire the title as Descendants of Alva Edward Peters and Sallie Jane Cole. I don’t think there is a variable to get both spouses listed without hardwiring both their names.
Start each generation on a new page
Include notes
No photos
Print uplines
Sentence template - [person] was born (date unknown). (this is not actually used because each person does have a birth date)
Paragraphs - Keep fact sentences in same paragraph. This is to prevent RM from adding stray paragraphs. The sentence template for each fact actually starts with a new line.
Print preparer information
Header - Print header, Mirror on even pages, Left - (blank), Center - [Title], Right - (blank)
Footer - Print footer, Mirror on even pages, Left - (blank), Center - Page [Page], Right - (blank)
Styles and fonts
Default - Garamond 10pt (or maye New Times Roman)
Text (Narr) - Garamond 10pt (or maye New Times Roman)
Headings (Narr) - Arial, 14pt, bold
Header - Verdana, 11pt
Footer - Verdana, 11pt
Footnote - Tahoma, 9pt
Endnote - Tahoma, 9pt
Bibliography - Garamond, 11pt (not actually used)
Index - Cambria, 10pt
These fonts are very personal font choices that may not suit all users. Sometimes these font choices don’t suit me very much, either. Also, sometimes the correct fonts don’t show up in MS Word and I have to specify the correct a second time in MS Word before printing. In particular, I have to change the endnote font from Times New Roman to Tahoma before printing, even though I specified Tahoma as the option. Similarly, I have to change the font for the Index from Times New Roman to Cambria before printing even though I specified Cambria as the option in RootsMagic.
Endnotes at end of document, reuse endnotes, don’t use Ibid.
Indexes, Name (birth and death date, 2 columns), Reverse place, 2 columns
My database includes a Parents fact for each person who has parents. Therefore, I do not need or want the “son of” clause or the “daughter of” clause for the spouses. This clause is not under control of RM’s sentence templates and there is not an option to suppress it in reports. Therefore, i delete the clause. In RM7, I used a text editor and Regular Expressions. In RM10, I used MS Word’s closest equivalent to Regular Expression. Namely I used the More option and the Use WildCards option. With these options in place, I replaced , son of $^l with ^l. and , daughter of $^l with ^l. except that the dollar sign is really an asterisk. It does not seem to be possible to type an asterisk into this forum without messing up the format of my message. At this point, I have to be sure to turn off the WildCards option because there will be more global replaces that are required, and the additional global replaces don’t work with the WildCards option enabled.
This is where we remove the qq from the report as described above, so that we can remove the blanks from the beginnings of line that shouldn’t be there.
We now have the problem in both RM7 and RM10 of a humongous number of extra blank lines scattered throughout the report. In RM7, it was easy to use a text editor and regular expressions to remove these blank lines. With RM10, I use Microsoft Word to global replace ^l^p with ^p, and to global replace ^p^p^p with ^p^p .In Microsoft Word’s globally replace, ^p is the code for a new paragraph and ^l is the code for new line. With two exceptions, this deletes all the extra blank lines that need to be deleted.
One exception is that the entire area for the Preparer in the report is includes excessive blank lines. The easiest way to clean up this area of the report is manually. There is no reason for using a global replace.
The other exception is that there still remain a few extra blank lines between certain items in the report. These remaining extra blank lines appear only for people who have more than one spouse and the extra blank lines are between the list of children for one spouse and the facts for the next spouse. This is a complicated enough problem that I’m going to discuss it and its solution in a separate message.
RM’s mirroring of the Header and Footer does not set gutter control properly for two-sided printing. I do this in Microsoft Word via Layout > Margins > Mirrored.
I create the Name Index and the Place Index by highlighting each one in turn and clicking the F9 key for each one. We eventually will need to rebuild the indexes a second time.
I reformat the index entries to produce a more attractive appearance. The surnames and the leftmost part of a reversed place name will be in a larger font. I highlight an example of each index level and then Ctrl+Shift+S and Modify. For the highest level, I change the font size to 12 point and bold and change the font to Cambria. For the other index levels, I just change the font to Cambria. Generally speaking, I do this in the Place Index and the changes also applies to the Name Index. I do this in the Place Index because it has up to five index levels and the Name Index only has two index levels (for surname and given name).
I highlight the Name Index and the Place Index and click F9 for each of them one last time before printing. Actually, I just save the file and take a copy of the file to a print shop, rather than printing it myself.
Here is what the Name Index and the Place Index look like after making these aesthetic improvements.
