I'm interested in what people do on this one. Suppose you output a report from your favourite genealogical program in say DOC or RTF format because you want to put it through some manual editing in a word processing program. What is it you want to do? Is it to tweak the content (sounds a bit dubious - why wasn't it right in the first place)? Or perhaps you want to massage the appearance in some way. Any comments on your experiences would be appreciated. Regards Peter Peter J Seymour <mozng@pjsey.demon.co.uk>

> I'm interested in what people do on this one. > > Suppose you output a report from your favourite genealogical program > in say DOC or RTF format because you want to put it through some > manual editing in a word processing program. > > What is it you want to do? Is it to tweak the content (sounds a bit > dubious - why wasn't it right in the first place)? Or perhaps you > want to massage the appearance in some way. > > Any comments on your experiences would be appreciated. > > Peter J Seymour Many of us don't write full sentences in our NOTES files -- mostly that's those of us old enough to have started this before 5-and-a-quarter-inch floppies when space *mattered* who haven't cared to spend valuable research time tidying up the file. But, there do seem to be a lot of us. (g) So, however good the "make me a book" report IS, it can't fix sentence fragments so the grammar-hammer finds those and complains. "Was an insurance underwriter." has to turn into "He was an insurance underwriter." Additionally, the occasional typo creeps into NOTES and isn't spotted until it's in a book. Sometimes, a remark that makes PERFECT sense when it's in the NOTES becomes ambiguous in a book setting...either the antecedent of "he" becomes muddy or the thing just reads wrong or tacky ... "He was a traveller" for instance has various interpretations, only one of which applies to this individual, and might be nice if that were clear? Or "was dumb." When one knows the lady, one knows she was unable to speak, not unintelligent, but again, future generations won't know her, so let's make that clear. Then, there are the potentially embarrassing comments -- perfectly TRUE, but nonetheless rude and needlessly hurtful to persons more closely connected. Still, I can't be certain I've found all those until I look at the output. SOME people "tag" certain facts (OCCUP: farmer or MIL: Vietnam) using truncated words which need expanding, because OCCUP: farmer isn't a real sentence, even if you know what OCCUP means -- and MIL: Vietnam is either Military service in Vietnam /or/ Mother-in-law in Vietnam and clarity on that would be a good thing. ;) And of course -- the book generator in PAF and in Legacy throws in an enormous amount of white-space. Looks pretty, is useful for adding comments or new info, but uses more paper than it needs to. So I remove a lot of blank lines. I can sometimes reduce by half the number of pages to be printed. Now, whether tweaking the output each time I do output takes less time than fixing the input could be debatable. IMO, it is at least more fun to do the tweaks on output. Cheryl singhals <singhals@erols.com>

> I'm interested in what people do on this one. > > Suppose you output a report from your favourite genealogical program > in say DOC or RTF format because you want to put it through some > manual editing in a word processing program. > > What is it you want to do? Is it to tweak the content (sounds a bit > dubious - why wasn't it right in the first place)? Or perhaps you > want to massage the appearance in some way. > > Any comments on your experiences would be appreciated. > > Peter J Seymour This very very general question is rather irrelevant unless we know what program you are using, what you expect to do or what problems you are encountering. I send most of my reports to my wp so I can add index, bibliography and ToC if I want and adjust the fonts. I print out an editing copy of the report, say a Journal Descendant Report and then change my Tag sentences and/or data entry to make the final output read the way I want it. Sending tabular reports to my wp allows me to change the fonts and the formatting easily Sending the report to my wp allows me to send the report as an email attachment either in my wp file format or a text file. My program can output the report as a pdf file directly. bob gillis bob gillis <robertgillis@verizon.net>