Saved pdf files do not stay in notes

[barb]

I am trying to put the obituary in the notes field of obituary. It shows up and then when I come back to the field it is no longer there. It also happens in the records field when I type in which records I have. This is a new occurence as I have been entering this information all along.

[Bob Goode]

Re: Saved pdf files do not stay in notes

I am trying to put the obituary in the notes field of obituary. It shows up and then when I come back to the field it is no longer there. It also happens in the records field when I type in which records I have. This is a new occurence as I have been entering this information all along.

You can not save PDF files in a notes field. While you can drag and drop the PDF into the field and it initially is displayed, the PDF will not be saved upon closing the window. You can bring a PDF into "Multimedia" for the individual and it can be opened when you are in multimedia.
Keep in mind, that the image in multimedia is an alias (if using Reunion 10) and you must continue to retain the PDF on you computer, in a location such as Documents > Reunion files> and I have them in specific folders in the Reunion folder by surnames, place and other.

Bob

[Gato]

Re: Saved pdf files do not stay in notes

I am trying to put the obituary in the notes field of obituary. It shows up and then when I come back to the field it is no longer there. It also happens in the records field when I type in which records I have. This is a new occurence as I have been entering this information all along.

Barb, as Bob Goode explained, PDFs are attachable to Reunion records in multimedia, not in notes fields. The built-in Reunion manual has helpful information about multimedia attachments.

You can copy and paste the text of a PDF obituary into Reunion's notes fields, if the text in your PDF has been optically character read (OCR-ed). The text will be embedded invisibly in the PDF, in line with the graphic representation of the text. The simple way to find out if the text is there is to open the document and click and drag the cursor over the text you want: if text is embedded, the cursor will become the familiar text selection tool and text dragged over will be highlighted.

If you use Adobe Acrobat to scan a PDF of a newspaper obituary, Acrobat has an OCR option to generate this embedded text. You might have to do a little cleaning up of the OCR-ed text if the quality of the original caused OCR errors, but this is easy to do.

For the second part of your question, I don't know what could be happening to cause loss of text that you type into fields within a record. Perhaps you could describe sequentially what you try to do, in which specific field/s, and what happens.

[Paul Reitz]

Re: Saved pdf files do not stay in notes

I am trying to put the obituary in the notes field of obituary. It shows up and then when I come back to the field it is no longer there. It also happens in the records field when I type in which records I have. This is a new occurence as I have been entering this information all along.

Barb, make sure you are using Reunion 10.0.5. Click on 'Reunion' in the menu bar and select 'About Reunion' to see which version is installed. I had the same experience you described, where typed text disappeared, in 10.0.4, which was fixed in later release of 10.0.4. It hasn't occurred in 10.0.5.

Regarding PDFs, Reunion will accept them in multimedia, but will not show a thumbnail, nor allow the file to be set as 'preferred'. You can use Preview.app to convert the pdf to a jpg. If you drag the jpg file into the person's multimedia frame and follow Reunion's procedure to set it as 'preferred', it will display on the family card to the left of the person's name.

A jpg file is a picture, which, as far as I know, can't contain text. So you'd have to extract that from the pdf as Gato described.

-Paul

[Bob White]

Re: Saved pdf files do not stay in notes

..........where typed text disappeared, in 10.0.4, which was fixed in later release of 10.0.4. It hasn't occurred in 10.0.5...........

I have this problem with only one record and just in the general notes field of that one record. Unknown to me when the problem started; I hadn't touched this record in several years AND I was able to record this cousin's death information successfully but the record will not retain anything in the general notes field. I have not found any other record, thus far, acting this way.

Also, I just reviewed the lists of fixes for .04 and .05. Nothing listed sounds like it is related to this problem. Something may be this; just don't see anything that seems related.

[Paul Reitz]

Re: Saved pdf files do not stay in notes

Bob, let me clarify. By 'disappeared', I mean it could be entered and would display until the field window was closed and re-opened.

I have this problem with only one record and just in the general notes field of that one record.

Doesn't sound the same. It happened in at least two different fields, on about half the person cards [records?] I tried; tens, maybe. Are you using 10.0.5?

[Gato]

Re: Saved pdf files do not stay in notes

Barb, make sure you are using Reunion 10.0.5. Click on 'Reunion' in the menu bar and select 'About Reunion' to see which version is installed. I had the same experience you described, where typed text disappeared, in 10.0.4, which was fixed in later release of 10.0.4. It hasn't occurred in 10.0.5.

Regarding PDFs, Reunion will accept them in multimedia, but will not show a thumbnail, nor allow the file to be set as 'preferred'. You can use Preview.app to convert the pdf to a jpg. If you drag the jpg file into the person's multimedia frame and follow Reunion's procedure to set it as 'preferred', it will display on the family card to the left of the person's name.

A jpg file is a picture, which, as far as I know, can't contain text. So you'd have to extract that from the pdf as Gato described.

-Paul

Hello Paul and Barb,

Suggestions by Paul and others that the disappearing text problem might be related to an outdated version of Reunion seem plausible: certainly it is prudent to make sure you have the current version. If the problem remains even in the latest version, I think you need direct tech support from Leister Productions. It's just possible that you have found one of those random glitches that they love to eliminate.

On the subject of JPEG/jpg: yes, this file format is basically a picture--the most widely used compressed imagery standard--but it *can* contain text in two levels that are valuable to Reunion users.

First, the simplest form of text content possible in a JPEG is a photo of text. Photos on cell phones or digital cameras, or scanned photos, of anything from monumental inscriptions to signage, museum exhibits, documents, letters and pages of books, can be saved in JPEG format and attached in Reunion multimedia. Further, Adobe Acrobat can turn a JPEG into a PDF. If text photographed is clearly readable and formatted, Acrobat's built-in optical character recognition (OCR) often can recognize and embed in a PDF text that was acquired in a JPEG.

Secondly, a JPEG contains text as metadata: structured information embedded in the file, invisible when the file is viewed as a photo. Some JPEG metadata is automatically generated: for instance, most cell phones and digital cameras record their name, type, lens, exposure details and date/time. A lot of further vital information--a detailed caption, especially--can be added to JPEGs in metadata using software like Adobe Bridge, part of the Adobe PhotoShop suite. Captions entered in this way can be read without special software, just by opening Mac OS X "Get Info" about the JPEG file. My strong recommendation to anyone using a lot of JPEGs and not wanting to lose vital information about them (from names of people photographed, to origin and any copyright info) is that all family history JPEGs *should* be edited with additional metadata. Metadata is a solution to the problem of old photos being handed down to future generations without information about their content. Of course, Reunion multimedia is also a solution to this problem, but the advantage of metadata is that it will be there even if JPEGs are separated from information about them recorded in Reunion.

Adobe Bridge is my favorite for editing JPEG metadata (and Adobe PhotoShop suite for photo handling in general), but there are numerous other applications with these features. By the way, Adobe Acrobat can also add and edit metadata in PDFs.

Although they are compressed, JPEG files need to be relatively large (3-8Mb commonly) to carry high resolution photos. While JPEGs can be very handy for acquiring images of text, they are often not best as the final file format for documents--especially multipage documents. This is where PDF shines. Not only can Adobe Acrobat OCR and embed text into a text-searchable PDF, but it also can compile a series of big JPEGs into one multipage PDF, and then reduce the overall file size. I find that the most efficient system for turning documents into PDFs is to create them directly in Adobe Acrobat with a flatbed scanner.

Gato

[Bob White]

Re: Saved pdf files do not stay in notes

Bob, let me clarify. By 'disappeared', I mean it could be entered and would display until the field window was closed and re-opened.

Doesn't sound the same. It happened in at least two different fields, on about half the person cards [records?] I tried; tens, maybe. Are you using 10.0.5?

Yes, I am on .5..... What you describe is what I thought you were saying and it perfectly describes what happens on just the one single record.

[Dennis J. Cunniff]

Re: Saved pdf files do not stay in notes

...a JPEG contains text as metadata: structured information embedded in the file, invisible when the file is viewed as a photo.

The trouble with JPEG is that it is a "lossy" format, and each time the file is opened, changed, and resaved, resolution is lost.

So if you open a JPEG file to add a caption or edit the metadata, you are going to lose picture resolution when you save it. If you do this a few times to the same picture, you're going to have noticable picture degradation.

The solution is to use a non-"lossy" format such as TIFF. The file will be a bit larger, but you will be able to edit it without loss of resolution.

[kmgenealogy]

Re: Saved pdf files do not stay in notes

...Further, Adobe Acrobat can turn a JPEG into a PDF. If text photographed is clearly readable and formatted, Acrobat's built-in optical character recognition (OCR) often can recognize and embed in a PDF text that was acquired in a JPEG...
Gato

PDFPen ($59.99) & PDFPenPro ($99.99) can also turn JPEG, TIFF into PDF for much less cost than Adobe Acrobat (if you don't already have Adobe Acrobat). I have turned several TIFF screenshots into one PDF file easily with PDFPenPro. Either of them also do OCR but I haven't tried that with the converted TIFF files yet.