> > 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. > > > > Peter J Seymour <mozng@pjsey.demon.co.uk> > > If I understand your question correctly, I'd think much would depend > on the output of your report generator. I have one, for example, > which will output date and place of death, even for living persons, > when the "show all events" option is selected. Now, even though the > output for living persons is something like "He died on _____ at > ____", the fact it appears at all is annoying and more than a bit > off-putting (took me a while to connect the output with selecting > that particular option, BTW). That's point one. 'Nother thought is > that you might want to rearrange the way the facts are presented, or > combine notes or modify any of a number of cosmetic things that your > report generator does well (good enough for government work) but not > as you might wish. Font, layout, pagination, indexing, title page, > table of contents, addition of graphics - there's a whole slew of > things you might want to "play" with to get the report to look the > way you want it. > > But the primary reason you might want to run the report through your > wordprocessor might be to convert it from, say, .doc or .rtf to, > say, .pdf or .ps. To my mind, anything that's MicroSoft or Apple > specific is immediately suspect and automatically goes to the bottom > of the pile for later conversion. (Notwithstanding that some 95% or > more of personal computers run some version of Windows or MacOS, > there are some who choose to run neither and may not be able to do > anything with those proprietary formats. As a result, you've wasted > your time and machine cycles preparing a report they'll likely never > read and have probably annoyed them more than just a little bit.) > > Swell Ol' Bob Melson So I guess that if the program will output in PDF format that will deal with your primary reason. It doesn't help with your minor adjustments though. It looks like the program ought to allow editing of the report before writing it to the file, but full-blown word processing within the program would be getting a bit tricky. I think I would be in favour of pushing back whatever those adjustments are to being report generation options so that the generated report is already as you want it (or pretty close). This would require a whole raft of detail options but that is probably manageable. Peter Peter J Seymour <mozng@pjsey.demon.co.uk>