Software of the Month Club 1996 May

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ Software of the Month Club 1996 May / Software of the Month Club 1996 May.iso / mac / ISO9660 / ZIPFILES / GIM_313.ZIP / GIM09.DOC < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1995-03-23 | 12.7 KB | 272 lines

CHAPTER 9 EDITING NOTES INTRODUCTION... We believe that the best way to organize your genealogical source and research notes is for us to provide you with the ability to annotate every event. As a result, every GIM event -- every birth, every christening and so on -- has a source and a research note associated with it. In addition, every person and family has room for notes that don't belong to these events, such as occupation and religious information. This chapter discusses GIM's Notes Area. In particular, it discusses: - viewing and editing source and research notes - arrow keys and other basic text editing - switching between windows - zooming a window - the difference between source and research notes - copying or moving text from one window to another - the clipboard VIEWING AND EDITING NOTES... Every event has a note. From the Person Area or the Family Area, look at any event, such as a birth event from the Person Area. To the left of the screen, on the same line as the birth date and birth place, is a pair of parentheses. These parentheses will either be empty -- "()" -- indicating that there are no notes for this event, or they will contain the word notes -- "(notes)" -- otherwise. In either case, move the cursor to those parentheses and press <enter>. This brings you to the Notes Area for that event. There are also a notes area for each person and a notes area for each family -- each called "Misc. Source Notes" and "Misc. Research Notes" in their respective Areas. Also see the Folder Notes by pressing Control-F5 from the Multi Area. The Notes Area is divided into three windows. The first is for source notes, the second is for research notes, and the final one is the clipboard. The differences between each of these windows will be discussed in a moment. ARROWS... Within any given window, to add text to the notes, simply start typing. As you approach the end of the line, the Notes Area will automatically wrap around to the start of the next line. Up, down, left and right arrows do what you think they should. Control-left and control-right arrows move to the start of the last or next word. The home key moves to the start of a line, and the end key moves to the end of a line. To insert a new, blank line, hit return. Alternatively, shift-F1 will insert a blank line before the current line, and shift-F2 will insert one after the current line. To delete the entire current line, press control-F1. To get it back, press control-F2. Finally, shift-F3 will join the current and the next line, if there is room enough for both on one line. It should be apparent from this description that GIM's Notes Area is not meant to even come close to serving as a full- featured word processor. It only means to provide the minimal functions necessary to allow text to be edited and changed. If you find you need some basic text editing functions that aren't provided here, please let us know. SWITCHING... As we said, we'll discuss the difference between the different windows in a moment. For now, it's important to know how to switch from one to the next. The F1 key moves to the source notes window, the F2 key moves to the research notes window, and the F3 key moves to the clipboard. In addition, F8 moves from source to research, or from research to the clipboard, or from the clipboard to source. Cursor position is retained from one window to the next as you switch between them. ZOOMING... Having all three windows on the screen at once has its advantages, but there are also times when it's nice to have one entire window fill the screen. This is especially true if you're working in 25-line mode, since there are only seven lines visible in the source and research windows at a time. To fill the screen with the text of the current window, press F4. This is called "zooming". To change it back -- to "unzoom" -- press F4 again. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOURCE AND RESEARCH NOTES... As we mentioned, each note is divided into three sections -- one for Source Notes, one for Research Notes, and one for the Clipboard. Any changes you make to the source notes or the research notes for any given event remain with that event. The clipboard is a little different, but we'll get to that in a moment. It's useful for you to make -- and adhere to -- some distinction between source and research notes, because some areas of GIM, such as the Family Group Record (see chapter 10) and GIM LISTS (see chapter 11), exploit that distinction by allowing you to treat them separately. It's up to you to decide how to you want to make that distinc- tion, that is, how you want to divide your comments between the source and the research notes, but we recommend the following guidelines: SOURCE NOTES... Source Notes are designed for careful documentation of sources of information. The Source Notes section aids in finding important sources for the information that you've located. It makes it easy for you to retrace your steps, to relocate important documents, to tell others how to find the documents that you have found, and to identify exactly what concrete source information you have and have not found. We recommend that all information of this type should go into the source notes section of the various notes areas. RESEARCH NOTES... Research Notes are for most other purposes besides source documentation. The Research Notes section gives you a place to put questions that need answering. It also gives you a place to put stories and biographical information. In addition, it gives you a place to put hints, ideas, flashes of inspiration, notes to yourself, and questions that don't yet have answers. We recommend that all such notes go in the research notes section of the various notes areas. COPYING OR MOVING TEXT BETWEEN NOTES... In order to move text from one window to another, it is necessary to identify the text to be moved. This process is called "blocking". To do this, go to the start of the text you want to move and press F5. This starts the blocking process. Then move to the end of the text you want to move and press either F6 (to copy the text to another location) or shift-F6 (to move the text to another location). Next, move to the location where you want the copied or cut text to go, and press F7 to paste the blocked text into its new location. WARNING: There is a limit of 25 lines that can be moved or copied at a time. Do not try to block more than 25 lines at a time. CLIPBOARD... Whatever you put into the clipboard stays in the clipboard until you take it back out. The clipboard travels with you from note to note to note, allowing you to copy or move notes from one place to another. For example, to move the text of a birth source note to a christening research note, first move that birth source note into the clipboard. Then, enter the christening notes area, and move that note back out of the clipboard. Similarly, to copy the text of a marriage source note to another person's burial research note, go to the first person's marriage source notes area. Then, copy the text of that note into the clip- board. Then, move to the second person's burial research notes area. Finally, move the text of the clipboard to the research notes. Okay, we know this sounds confusing. But try it, and you'll see what we mean. BLOCK FORMATTING... You can also use the blocking capability, described above, to reformat a block of text within margins. To do this, use the F5 key (as described above to start blocking) to select the start of the block you want to reformat. Then move the cursor to the end of the block you want to reformat and press shift-F5. After a brief pause, the computer will arrange the text between the start and end of the block into a neatly ordered paragraph. The left margin will be aligned with the left margin of the first line of the blocked text, and the right margin will be at the right edge of the screen. READING NOTES TEXT IN FROM A FILE... WRITING NOTES TEXT OUT TO A FILE... It is possible to read text files into GIM's notes, and it is also possible to write notes out to text files. We'll talk about reading text first, and then we'll discuss writing text after that. READING... If you read a file into GIM's notes, it must be a straight ASCII text file -- which simply means that it can't be a word processing document (such as those produced by Microsoft Word or Wordperfect) which may contain boldface or italics or other special fonts or formatting. Let us not be misunderstood: both Microsoft Word and WordPerfect documents can be converted into straight ASCII text (consult your manual for details), but unless they have been converted, GIM will not behave the way you expect it to when you import these documents. A simple way to avoid the whole word processing problem is to use a text editor (such as DOS's EDIT command) to create your text file. Anyway, having said that, you can read a text file into any GIM note by opening that note in the usual way, position the cursor to the point where you want the imported note to be, and then pressing the Shift-F4 key. At that point, you will see the same drive, directory and file selection box that you've seen elsewhere (such as when GIM first starts up, or when you do a GEDCOM transfer). Use it to select the file you want to import. If the text file is long, you may have to be patient, but when the import process is all done, the text file will be included as part of the note that you selected. If any of the lines in your original text file are longer than 78 characters (columns) long, you may find that those lines have been split to fit in GIM's notes window. If so, you may want to reformat them to your liking. Otherwise, the notes should appear just as they did in your original text file. WRITING... The file writing feature is just the file reading feature in reverse. To activate it, open a note in the usual way, and press the F5 key to block the beginning of the text you want to write. However, instead of pressing F6 or Shift-F6 (as described above), press the Shift-F4 key to write the blocked text to a file. At that point, you will see the same drive, directory and file selection box that you've seen elsewhere (such as when GIM first starts up, or when you do a GEDCOM transfer). Use it to select the directory of the file you want to export. When you select a directory, GIM will ask you for a file name, and will write the blocked notes text to that file. MORE TO COME... In a near-future release, the Notes Area will include mouse support, including the ability to position the cursor with a mouse. Currently, there is no mouse support in this Area, except for the usual ability to select menu options.