How to get an empty sentence?

[holgersen 0]

I have a number of census events in which the father and mother in the household are principals and the children are witnesses. When printing a report with my ancestors I'd like to see the census events for the father in the family but I se no point in seeing the information repeated for the mother and therefore I'd like an empty sentence for the mother.

 

Unfortunately an empty sentence means it will be copied from the other principal and using the empty memo <[M0]> still produces a space character and a .. Hence a number of census events for a mother in a household following each other looks like . . . . in my reports.

 

Is there a way to get an absolutely empty sentence for a principal of an event?

[Terry Reigel 0]

Well, no. But you can get the same effect. Make the first character in the sentence for that person an exclusion marker (a hypen). It doesn't matter whether you have anything after that or not - the sentence will be ignored.

 

I assume you are using a report other than the Journal - in the Journal reports joint tags for spouses are ignored for the second spouse, so you don't get the repeated output even if you don't modify the sentence.

[holgersen 0]

Well, no. But you can get the same effect. Make the first character in the sentence for that person an exclusion marker (a hypen). It doesn't matter whether you have anything after that or not - the sentence will be ignored.

 

I assume you are using a report other than the Journal - in the Journal reports joint tags for spouses are ignored for the second spouse, so you don't get the repeated output even if you don't modify the sentence.

 

Hi Terry,

 

Thank you for your reply. I am using the journal (ancestor report - in Danish) report but still see events repeated for spouses. However, using the hyphen did do the trick for me and I rather have to use this than having the program leaving out the tags for the seconds spouse (that way I can control everything myself). Thanks!

[Terry Reigel 0]

Sorry. My mistake. The double tags do appear in ancestor journals. In descendant journals, where the spouse section is actually a subpart of the descendant's section, they do not.

 

One point you might think about though. If you might want to use Second Site to put your data on a website (either posted on the Internet or distributed to relatives on CDs) the format is more like a series of Individual Narratives, connected by hyperlinks. So you might want the duplicated tags in that format.

[Evenwhen 0]

How does one get an empty sentence for "NarrativeChildren"? In cases where I don't know if there were children or not, I would rather not comment either way. But when I put anexclusion marker in the sentence for the NarrativeChildren tag I get the default sentence instead. My only work-around is to put in a Tab and NP and edit with Word to eliminate the extra spaces and blank lines.

[Terry Reigel 0]

As you have discovered, if you eleminate the sentence the result is no output, so the standard text is supplied. The solution is to use the special sentence variable [:none:] to suppress all output.

 

This is described in Help in the article "Special Journal Report Tag Types" - searching Help for NarativeChildren will turn up that article.

[Evenwhen 0]

Thanks, Terry, that will teach me to pay closer attention to the new functionality of TMG. That works like a charm.

[Terry Reigel 0]

You're welcome.

 

Don't worry about it. I went to my articles on the NarrativeChildren tag and my List of Variables to be sure I had that right before responding, and found it was mentioned in neither of them. It was added after the release of version 7.00, and I had failed to update those two articles to reflect the addition. I've now done so.