Indent on Descendant Indented Report Refuses to Change

[Linda (Babbin) Jones 0]

I'm trying to print a Descendant Indented Report, and a 5-space indent is just too much, resulting in overflow or truncation, neither of which is a good thing.

 

I set the indent to 3 spaces, but the report is still indenting 5 spaces. Tried 2 spaces, just for the heck of it, but it's still indenting 5 spaces.

 

I'm exporting to a .pdf file.

 

There are way too many different variations on the lines to be able to do a search and replace. I really would like to get a report I can publish with a smaller indent. Can anyone help?

 

And while I'm on the subject, I don't see an option to print longer lines. Is that something I can change somewhere? At least that would prevent truncation or overflow, even if a person might not see the whole line without scrolling a bit.

 

Linda

Edited January 17, 2013 by Linda (Babbin) Jones

[Virginia Blakelock 0]

Linda -

 

I was able to condense the chart a bit by using .5 left and right margins, landscape mode, Tahoma 8 font for everything; only birth and death tags, and the Short Place option (you could also select specific place fields - eliminate 'county' for example). I also found no way to change the indent.

 

 

An option for a small group of people is a box chart / descendant waterfall as in the example on the VCF forum here.

 

Virginia

 

 

[Linda (Babbin) Jones 0]

Hi, Virginia-

 

Thanks so much for taking the time to work on this. My report is 7,000 people, and goes to 11 generations, so the indent becomes really serious as you get past 4 or 5 generations. I've been using TMG for over 15 years, and I'm just stunned that after all this time, I can't specify the indent on this report, nor can I specify how wide my lines can be.

 

I have switched to landscape and you're right, I should set the margins as small as TMG will accept, and that will help some. But I really, really need to be able to set the indent. It's aggravating that the option is there, but it just doesn't work.

 

I dearly love the program, but honestly, reports haven't improved since the DOS version, at least not the reports I need.

[Terry Reigel 0]

Linda,

 

I can see that the Tab / indent control isn't changing the amount of indent by generation. But I don't think it's supposed to. Notice the main label for the control is "Tab." It is supposed to control the amount of space when a "tab" character is invoked, but tabs aren't even used in this report. They are only used in narrative reports, or when you include Memo text which includes the [:TAB:] code. What you are talking about here is much more involved than a "tab" - it involves the number of horizontal line segments added as well as the number of spaces between vertical lines.

 

I think the error here is in leaving that control in the options for this report when it never applies.

 

What you are asking for is a new feature to control the indent for each generation, not the tab spacing. I agree that would be helpful, especially when one has lots of generations in the report.

[Linda (Babbin) Jones 0]

Hi, Terry-

 

You're right of course, that it isn't a "tab" but it's definitely an "indent."

 

The very fact that it involves a lot of different characters and conditions is just why I need it to be corrected while generating the report, because it's almost impossible afterwards--you have to worry that each time you replace one set of characters, you're changing the relationships of other characters whose spacing you want to fix.

 

This was actually possible back in the DOS version, and reports I generated with it are still online. When I got the first Windows version and saw that this feature had been lost, I thought surely it would be addressed soon, but I've been waiting for years. It's one reason I continued to use the DOS version until new computers with new versions of Windows wouln't run it any more (memory issues). I'd really like to update the online files to help out people following my lines, but I'm really unhappy with all the wrapped lines.

 

Has nobody else ever asked for this in all this time? I guess I should have been more active in the forums....

[Michael Hannah 0]

Hi Linda,

 

You are correct. I cannot find a lot of mention about this report when I searched the forums. I agree that the option to control the indent would be a nice new feature. However, until then, how about these as (somewhat crude) workarounds?

 

Generate your report in Version 7 using the output file type "Ascii Text without soft CR/LF".

(In Version 8 this would be "Text (ASCII, unformatted)" )

This output style has only one space for indents, so gets more on a line (but it uses typewriter characters rather than lines so it doesn't look as good).

 

Now open the output in your favorite word processor. Each person will be a separate paragraph. Set the paragraph options so that the "first line" of a paragraph is at the left margin, but the subsequent lines of a paragraph are indented quite a lot. This leaves the beginnings of lines with their '+' and '*' codes to line up, but gets the wraparound of the lines out of the way.

 

At least this gets more on a line and is readable. If you want to try to clean it up a bit, you can find/replace the '+' and '*' to graphic characters to make it a bit more readable, but that might be tedious, especially as the "first" of a set of '***' is a vertical line but the rest need to be horizontal.

 

With ASCII output you lose the graphic lines, but it does have less indent.

 

The only other work-around I can think of is a Descendant Box chart in Waterfall mode, where you only have one line of text, remove the surrounding box, and minimize the margins. But the best you could do with that is only have the lifespan as the one line of text.

 

Hope this at least gives you some ideas.