Book, editing text

[Frank Zwolinski]

Hi all,
The Book Report is a nice option but, try as I may, I cannot see how to edit the information created from the Register Report before finishing the book.

Any ideas?
Frank

[donworth]

Re: The new BOOK option

I presume you are expected to do the editing in Reunion and regenerate the book. The Register Report text appears to be "locked down".

[Frank Zwolinski]

Re: The new BOOK option

I presume you are expected to do the editing in Reunion and regenerate the book. The Register Report text appears to be "locked down".

Don, That is what I am thinking; I wrote to Leister about that. In my case, I have MUCH MORE in my Family File than I ever want in a finished book to share with others and the narrative just doesn't flow with all that.
Frank

[donworth]

Re: The new BOOK option

I do too - I usually have a biography first in the MISC NOTES field, then the word RESEARCH: followed by a jumble of research notes, records I'm not sure pertain to the person, census transcriptions and what have you.

It looks like, by default, BOOKS only includes the MISC NOTES field in the register report narrative. There are other types of NOTES fields you can attach to a person - such as RESEARCH notes, MILITARY notes, etc. And you can create your own notes types. None of these other types of notes appear in the book. So you could move your bio to the MISC NOTES field and put your other stuff in the other fields.

You can also define layouts as you would for a Register Report in Books and include the other notes fields - although I tried that and it did not include any of my other notes fields in the layout even when I checked the box for them to be included. Might be a bug?

EDIT: nm - I got it to work. Apparently you have to click APPLY TO SPOUSE in there for the right hand person to also be affected by the addition of the alternate notes fields. It prefixed the text in the Book Register Report with the name of my notes type ("Stuff: ") but doesn't do that for MISC NOTES. Odd... maybe if you add the STUFF notes to the default person notes it won't prefix it with "Stuff: " - I dunno.

EDIT to EDIT: Of course, the problem with adding more NOTES types is that the GED tags for the additional notes types won't be recognized by other programs that may import a GED from your Reunion database.

Don

[Frank Zwolinski]

Re: The new BOOK option

Hi Don,

I did finally hear back from Mark at Leister and he said: "However, having the ability to edit the text in the report via the book project window is on our wish list for consideration." As a result of their willingness to look into making the project editable, I think I will wait on doing a book. Fiddling around with all (I mean TONS!!) of my various notes and additional information, is just too open to making matters worse. I do like the Book Project function, I will just wait until it is tweeked a bit.

Thank you for your suggestions.
Also, lets see if anyone else has a thought on this.

Frank

[Barnbarroch]

Re: The new BOOK option

Frank, I agree with you entirely that it's important to be able to edit the content reasonably easily - though I suppose that can be done once it's in PDF format.

There is also at least one bit of wording that could well be improved!

To say of someone
He second did not marry Margaret McQUIGGAN
meaning "He had a relationship outside marriage with..."
is a pretty clumsy way to put it.

I'm not sure my way is much better but at least it makes some sense.

Jamie.

[Dennis J. Cunniff]

Re: The new BOOK option

There is also at least one bit of wording that could well be improved!

To say of someone
He second did not marry Margaret McQUIGGAN
meaning "He had a relationship outside marriage with..."
is a pretty clumsy way to put it.

Given that we don't have a way to specify when a relationship occured, and given the nature of relationships and marriage (they can occur successively *or* simultaneously) I would opt for something like "he also had a relationship with"... or, depending on one's mood, "he also had a non-marital relationship with"... or "he also had a sexual relationship with". Or, for a relationship that produced offspring, "he also had (a child/children) with".

[Gregg]

Re: The new BOOK option

There is also at least one bit of wording that could well be improved!

To say of someone
He second did not marry Margaret McQUIGGAN
meaning "He had a relationship outside marriage with..."
is a pretty clumsy way to put it.

I'm not sure my way is much better but at least it makes some sense.

"did not marry" can be modified in Reunion's Field Preferences window.

From Reunion's main menubar choose Reunion > Preferences > Fields > Family > Marriage and select Unmarried from the list. You can change the text in the Verb field and a Sample of the output is displayed.

There is no control over the words "first" "second" etc.

[Barnbarroch]

Re: The new BOOK option

There is no control over the words "first" "second" etc.

Gregg, please can we have more control, then. We may not know in which order things happened!

At all costs, give us the tools to record as much info as we can but PLEASE NEVER force us to give false info!

Jamie.

[B Jansen]

Re: The new BOOK option

I agree with you entirely that it's important to be able to edit the content reasonably easily

Yes, this!

[Ruth Wright]

Re: Book, editing text

I was equally frustrated that editing 'Book' seemed impossible. However I played around with and this seems to work on a Mac -

Select person in Family View
Select Book
Select the various options
Click Create Book Project
Click Create
Click Create and Open PDF Book
New window comes up - Click Preview
IN PREVIEW view Edit-Select All > Copy
Paste into a Word Document
Not a perfectly formatted copy but all the chosen elements are there, including refs, picture gallery etc. Can then edit, add images and etc. in Word.

Hope it works for others too!

[Susan Park]

Re: Book, editing text

Ruth, I've been using this method for well over 20 years. Even back in my dos based Roots III days I would send the Roots III report over to WordPerfect and then make all the editing changes necessary. I have used many different genealogy programs over the years and all of them will organize your data into book format, but all of them also require a trip to the word processing beauty shop to make them look nice.

[Robin Helmond]

Re: Book, editing text

I like the book feature of Reunion. I see it as a useful means of broadcasting one's research to others in a common format, PDF. I like the embedded links and the multimedia content too. I see it as an interim format until I get around to actually writing the history in my own words. I fear my time may run out before I stop the fun of research and get to work on the book.
I haven't tried converting it into a Word document as yet, but wonder if the imbedded links will still work after the conversion.
And thanks Greg, I had looked but not found those preferences. Now I know.

[HJKeats]

Re: Book, editing text

I like the book feature, I use it to distribute mini-books to individuals who have shown an interested in the research and those who may have contributed to it; a sort of thank you gift. Embellished with pictures and other pertinent information they treasure it. I also apply the relationship tag which puts into context the individuals contained within the booklet.

Before producing the book I would insert two pages consisting of a preface with copyright information, an offer for individuals to get back to me with errors or omissions and a note about no distribution or publication. I would also insert one or more notes page(s), as well as a graphic on relationship to explain the 2C2R (2C2R*) complete with text in simple language to explain the terminology another two-three pages.

I produce a number of these books, some as teasers to invite others to share in my research and others as a thank you gift. The option I was hoping to get from the building of these books within Reunion is the ability to incorporate those extra pages as (user generated) pre-defined inserts as opposed to inserted a blank page renaming it to an appropriate title and then pasting the text from an external source using cut-paste format. Less "oops I forgot to include this" and less steps to incorporate the inserts.

I would also like to apply a date option that appears on one of these pages as it then becomes a record with a date stamp if new information is produced on a later book.

Thanks to the Reunion folk for the tremendous work on Reunion.

[baddorfdeb]

Re: Book, editing text

If you are referring to a *literal* cut and paste of these add-in items, perhaps you would benefit from my (rather lengthy) posts in this thread

http://www.reuniontalk.com/showthread.php?t=10391

I saved several external items (such as a chart explaining relationships) and included them into Reunion Book pages. Thus, they *stay* there when I recalculate or even reprint the book.

Not that I've done anything else with my book since creating it, in summer of 2015. But I did find some spiffy techniques .....