On Saturday 13 June 2009 09:38, singhals (singhals@erols.com) opined: <snip> >> I suspect that adding a bunch of formatting options to the report >> generator wouldn't be justifiable - I don't _know_ that, but think >> it likely. >> >> Bob Melson > > A year or so back, someone (here?) posted an objection to the way > her software phrased "died 14 Oct 1998" -- she felt "died" was too > bald. > > So I frittered away some of my "copious spare time" ;) reading the > death notices and obits in my local newspaper. It quickly became > obvious why the genie programs all use "died" -- it's the least > objectional alternative. Well, yeah, the range of inoffensive options is kinda limited - the only other one I can think of just off the top is "passed" or "passed away" and even that may have cultural connotations I'm unaware of. > If you're Hindu or Jewish, do you want your report to say that your > father was Called Home To Jesus on 14 Oct 1998? If your mother was a > Ph.D. in Biochemistry, do you want the report to claim she Graduated > on 14 Oct 1998? If your uncle was agnostic or atheist, you won't > want to say he Entered Eternal Glory on 14 Oct 1998. And if your > other uncle was executed by the State for mass murder ... ? > > Nope. Died. One word fits all situations. > > Then, the issue of fonts, faces, sizes, graphics and cutlines. In a > wordprocessor (whether it's PCWrite or WordPerfect of OO or > whatever) you can go through and flag the DSP entries, or who died > of Cancer or who was in Korea. Putting that level of options into > the text-producing software built-into the genie program would > inflate the genie program to swallow Jupiter (c Paramount Pictures) > and slow it down like nobody's business. Gramps does a pretty good job when it comes to basic output options - font, size, justification - and output type - pdf, postscript, doc/rtf, etc. - and whether to view or just write to file. Note, I'm not speaking of what's included in the report, just how it's formatted. I think it's made the right choice in NOT including complex word processing functionality, leaving that to an external application, instead. It's the right decision, IMNSHO, because the choice is/was to have a reasonably competent genealogical program OR a wordprocessor with genealogical capabilities. It's not so much that "never the twain shall meet" as it is a matter of deciding where the program's emphasis should be. Why add something to the program that's handled well/better by another application? > Then again, maybe it's the latent Wm Shakespeare in all of us that > simply wants some level of creative input. (g) But all this is a bit far afield from the original question, which I understood to be something like "if you edit your report generator's output, why, and, further, why not make the generator's edit functions more powerful so you don't have to pass it through an external word processor?" Why do I edit my generator's output? Pretty much for all the reasons I've already stated: better font control, pagination, justification, widow/orphan control, order of presentation, rewording of potentially offensive phraseology, cleaning up notes, better source citations, inclusion of graphics, a whole raft of things the report generator doesn't do as well as a word processor can. As for including those word processor functions in the genealogy program, I think, as I indicated above, that it comes down to a trade-off: do you want a genealogy program with a lot of unrelated infrequently used bells'n'whistles or do you want some basic functionality that can be passed to a more competent external word processing application? I suspect the designers/programmers of most genealogy programs have chosen the latter option because it makes more sense to concentrate of the genealogy side rather than get wrapped around the axle re-inventing the wheel. Semi-dehydrated Ol' Bob (we're in the midst of a drought, y'know) -- Robert G. Melson | Rio Grande MicroSolutions | El Paso, Texas ----- A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have. Thomas Jefferson Bob Melson <amia9018@mypacks.net>