For example, I've been less than consistent entering a trailing carriage return at the end of notes.
I used that technique for many years to introduce white space and improve the appearance of the reports. Let me suggest a couple of alternatives that you might want to consider.
For narrative reports under Options you will find three option available for controlling white space:
- Keep fact sentences in same paragraph
- New paragraph after every fact,
- New Paragraph after every fact with notes
These are relatively new options, meaning they have been there for a few years but not all the way back to the beginning of RM. I wish I could report that the options meet my needs, but I find that they are not quite flexible enough so I don't use them. But you might find that they do meet your needs.
Another option is to go into Lists->Fact Type List where you can change the sentence template for each fact type. A couple of years ago I decided to change all the sentence templates I use to include a carriage return at the beginning of the sentence. I really don't use more that 12 to 18 different fact types, so making this change didn't take very long at all. But in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that removing all the trailing carriage returns from all those tens of thousands of notes I had entered through the years was tenable only because I was able to do it with an SQLite script. If you are just getting started with RM, this shouldn't be an issue for you.
Despite switching over to using carriage returns in the source templates, there is one situation where I found I need to keep the trailing carriage returns in the fact note. Namely, the last family fact note needs still needs to have a trailing carriage return. The format for RM's narrative report is in three parts for a couple: the individual facts for one spouse, the couple facts, and the individual facts for the second spouse. Without the trailing carriage return in the last fact note, there is not appropriate white space between the couple facts and the individual facts for the second spouse. For most couples, the last family fact is just their marriage fact. But for example, if somebody has marriage, divorce, marriage, divorce, then the trailing carriage return I have to keep is for the second divorce.
Another issue is that you will find is that your trailing carriage returns are lost on GEDCOM export. It's a bug that was introduced in RM4 and has never been fixed. And because RM's drag and drop operations to move data from one database to another make use of a GEDCOM export/import behind the scenes, your trailing carriage returns will be lost on any drag and drop operation. My solution has been to include a dummy private note after the trailing carriage return so that the carriage return is not the last character in the note. For example, you might type in {cr} after the actual carriage return or something like that. Then you have to remember to use the report option not to print private notes and you also have to consider if there are any situations where you might actually need to print private notes.
The lost trailing carriage returns in GEDCOM export seems to be a very different problem than is the problem in TreeShare where it appears that all carriage returns in fact notes are being lost when the notes are sent from RM to ancestry.com. GEDCOM export does not lose all carriage returns, just trailing ones at the end of notes. I'm hoping that this lost carriage return problem in TreeShare is fixable from within RM and is not something about how ancestry.com's API works. If the problem is in the API, then the RM developers would have to ask ancestry.com to fix it.
Jerry
