Brad Miller

Well, I thought maybe it would be helpful to someone if I posted what I've ended up with. I've ended up not going with Teresa's approach, except to remove the commas, in large part because it would require extensive reworking of my data. It would also require duplicating many places, due to the embedded words in the Output Templates. For example I have a location where the country is "X". I have one tag where the person visited X and another where the person was born in X. Embedding the pronoun "in" in the Output Template --- which is what I was considering doing --- would require me to create two places, "X", one with the "in" and one without. Another problem I had was that if I put "near" into an Output Template (Place Style), then my sentences would state "in near City, State." So here is what I've ended up with. I created a second Place Style called "Rural", which is identical to my "Default Style" except to remove the comma. I already had "Rural" Roles defined for any tags which used one of these places. So when I have a location which is "near Town, State" or "S. of Town, State", I select both the "Rural" Role and the "Rural Place Style. Seems like every solution I tried had a drawback and the same was true with what I've ended up with. Since I'm using the Role in an unconventional way to get rid of the pronoun "in", if I have a Tag Type which makes use of special Witness Roles AND the Rural situations, I've had to create more Witness Roles to accommodate the Rural situation. So let's say there is a rural Funeral and I have a Pall Bearer Role already; I'd need to create a "Pall Bearer Rural" Role to create the desired sentence output. For me anyway it seems like it would be preferable if TMG would not include the pronoun "in" automatically, but allow me to handle it. Or at least if there could be a way to override this setting, it would be nice. I'm not sure this would have solved all of my problems, but at one point in my musings it would have seemed helpful! Thanks, Brad

Ok, I have added a second place style to use for imprecise locations, removing the comma after the [Detail] field. This works fine in the output sentence, however now I'm getting the following: John Doe died on Sep 23, 1884 in near Herington, KS at age 74. So I've successfully removed the comma, but I have a pronoun problem. For the Residence tag I had made extensive use of Roles to fiddle with the pronouns (among other things) and ended up with a fairly long list of Roles. The one to handle "near" for a Residence is: [P] <|and [PO]> lived < [L]> <[D]> <[M]> The space in front of [L] got rid of the unwanted pronoun. I thought it would be nice to deal with this pronoun in the place style but I wasn't successful. The Output Template for the custom style is: <[Addressee], ><[Detail] ><[City], ><[Township], ><[County], ><[state], ><[Country], ><[Zip], ><[Phone], ><[LatLong]> I tried putting a space in front of the Addressee and in front of the Detail but this didn't work; I still get the pronoun "in". Any suggestions? Or is this even possible to do this way? Maybe I have to use the Roles or custom sentences? Thanks! Brad

Thanks Theresa & Jim for your responses. Jim: I assume by the local sentence structure you mean that you would only have "Dillsburg, PA" in the Master Place List (MPL) and then you'd add the extra details like "near" or "farm S. of" in a custom sentence --- most of these are used in Residence tags in my case. Seems like that would make a lot of custom sentences, unless I'm missing something. But it would reduce the number of places in the MPL. Theresa: Thanks for the links. To date I've only used one Place Style and I've only recently begun paying much attention to sentence output. Your approach is a nice one and also solves the problem of the default pronoun "in" not being appropriate for every location. I had been trying to fix this with using roles for some of the tag types, but wasn't completely satisfied with this. That's another topic, however. I was going to ask if I had to go into the MPL to change the place style when entering a new location in a tag but I see there is a button on the Tag Entry screen for this purpose. I have a few other questions about how this works out but I guess I'll have to try it out to see. Thanks again, Brad

I have dozens of places entered which are either 1) imprecise or 2) rural locations. When the location is given as near a town I have entered the word "near" in the Detail (L2) field. Other locations are given by directions from a more precise location so I have entered something like "S. of" or "farm 1-1/2 miles north of" in the Detail field. The problem is that the sentences created for tags using these locations include a comma: "near, Dillsburg, PA" for example. I think I could create a second place style and use it only for these places, altering the output template for that place style to remove the comma. Is there an easier way to accomplish this? Obviously I don't want to create custom sentence output for every tag that uses this convention. Anyone have other ideas? I should mention also that these are situations where I do want the directions to print out in reports. If I am simply inserting directions to the location for my own purposes I use the comment field for the place in the Master Place List. Or I put them in the memo field of a tag and exclude them from the output. Thanks, Brad Miller

Thanks for the quick replies. And here I thought it was a bug in the software. It would be nice if the feature could be turned off, or at least have it not happen if there are more than two principal roles. But it's not a real big deal. Thanks, Brad

I have observed some unusual behavior when selecting roles for the principal in an event tag. I'm using TMG 7.0.3. For this particular tag I have defined several possible roles for the principals. For example: Principal, Role1, Role2, Role3. Quite often when selecting a role, the role is changed for the other principal as well. For example if I choose Role1 for Principal #1, Role2 shows up for Principal #2. If I choose Role3 for Principal #3, Role2 shows up for Principal #1. If I choose Principal (default role) for either Principal #1 or Principal #2, the other principal is also changed to the default Principal role. I hope that all wasn't too confusing; the specifics of the behavior aren't really what's important. It would seem to me to be undesirable behavior to have the role change in a dropdown other than where I'm making the selection. Thanks, Brad

I have discovered what I think is a bug. I'm running TMG 7.0.3. Here is the sequence of events: In the Tag Entry screen I click on the + button to open the Add Witness screen. Then I click on the binoculars button to open the Expanded Picklist. The person's name as a witness is listed as her married name so I select the married name (non-primary) in the picklist. Upon returning to the Add Witness screen I see the married name in both the name selection dropdown and in the sentence preview. Upon returning to the Tag Entry screen, however, the witness is added with her primary name rather than the one I had selected. This would not seem to me to be the desired behavior. There are multiple ways around the problem but it would certainly be nice if the correct name was returned to the Witnesses. Thanks, Brad

Hi. No it's the other way around. I'm trying to add a button to a custom toolbar for the Layout Manager. The Layout Manager can also be selected from View-Layouts-Manage Layouts. There is a button for it present on the built-in Layouts toolbar, but I would like to add this button to my custom toolbar. Thanks, Brad

I am running TMG 7.0.3 and have noticed two issues with the custom toolbar buttons. 1. The button "Run a book manager of a specific name" is missing the dropdown box in which to select the book manager, therefore rendering this button useless. 2. The menu selection View - Layouts which brings up the Layout Manager does not seem to be available to the custom toolbars. Thanks, Brad

I am having trouble getting the results I desire in the Check for Duplicate People tool. I am using TMG 5.15. I have created three duplicate persons unrelated to the others in the database which I am using for testing. These three have Given names and Surnames which are exact duplicates to three others in the database. Here is the criteria I am using: Summary = default settings Surnames = have same soundex, don't match if unknown Given names = have same soundex, don't match if unknown, Evaluate first name only Birth, Death & Parents are not evaluated Filters = All people Using these settings 1113 pairs of duplicates are returned, but the three test cases are not. They are not excluded pairs. When I change the Given Name criteria to "have same first letter", then I receive 4793 pairs of duplicates and three test cases are found. One of them is: Jon Bradley Miller (1) Birth: Jun 29, 1970, Lewistown Hospital, Lewistown, PA Death: Father: Daryl Ethan Miller (4) Mother: Carol Lucille Winger (5) Jon B. Miller (2016) Birth: Death: Father: Daryl Miller (2017) Mother: Carol Winger (2018) 2016, 2017 & 2018 are my test persons. They are duplicate to persons 1, 4 & 5 and should all be identified as duplicates even if I choose identical spelling. Incidentally if I set both Surnames & Given names to identical spelling I receive 537 pairs, but these three are still not identified. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks. Brad Miller