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I love the Tree View narrative and wondered if it might be possible to let the admin decide to add other facts and perhaps the Story to the narrative by tick box selection?

The narrative is a great tool for me but also it looks great printed to hand to older people who are never going to get on the internet.

My tree

I’m happy to take a look at the Tree View code, but must confess it’s not my work.

For  “to let the admin decide to add other facts” can you elaborate on what facts you are thinking of?

With “perhaps the Story to the narrative ” do you mean the “Stories” tab contents? That will be a lot harder:

1. It’s not GECOM data so will need a lot of work to combine it.
2. How long are your stories. Mine, and I know many others would extend to multiple pages if printed, complete with images etc….
3. Because kiwitrees has little to no control over how you format your stories I’m not sure it would be easy to fit into an existing layout.
4. Where in the output would you put it?

Nigel
My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info

Even if we were to stick to the GEDCOM data my first thought goes to immigration:

eg: John Henry immigrated to Sydney, Australian on 01 August 1949.

But this would easily transfer to things like christening or burial data.

The idea on the admin selection is to allow admin to select how big the report will end up.  If the report ends up processor hungry he can strip it back to bare bones by only selecting certain gedcom data to be translated into the narrative form.

If we could add the Stories from the story tab the printed form would be a very readable book like format that would be easy to had to other relatives.  The size of the report will depend on the number of generations you choose to include.

I would try as much as possible to imitate the formatting of the story and place it directly under the last paragraph of gedcom info for each individual

1.1  George Wilson Potts, son of George Potts and Elizabeth Wilson, was born on 9 August 1801 in Livingston, Columbia, New York, USA and died on 12 August 1845 in Linlithgo, Columbia, New York, USA at the age of 44. He married 2 times. The 1st time he married Maria Van Hoesen, daughter of Elijah Van Hoesen and Hannah Herdick, on 11 February 1821 in Linlithgo, Columbia, New York, USA. She was born in1801 and died on 6 August 1824 in Livingston, Columbia, New York, USA at the age of 23. The 2nd time he married Elizabeth “Betsey”Spickerman, daughter of Johannes Spickerman and Margaret “Mary” “Maria” Dekker, in 1827 in Linlithgo, Columbia, New York, USA. She was born on 9 March 1800 in Livingston, Columbia, New York, USA and died on 20 December 1876 in Livingston, Columbia, New York, USA at the age of 76.

George Wilson immigrated to Australia …

Story …

I currently have 12 individuals selectable in my Tree View.  I chose root ancestors of my main families.  The ones that I want my visitors to be a part of.

My tree

Some initial thoughts (not meant to appear negative – the proposal does have considerable merit):

1. The “other facts” do come with issues. Take “immigration” for example, do you use the tag IMIG or EMIG, or both if you know about departure and arrival? I know my own data is inconsistent in this regard. It may be true of many other tags as well (such as BAP/CHR). Then there are cultural differences (Bar Mitzvah vs baptism??) But perhaps we can simply provide an input box where you could enter your own comma delimited list of additional facts?
2. Then there’s the challenge of the text to include for linking the facts into sensible sentences, and ensuring it is readily translatable by all the languages that need a completely different sentence structure.
3. It’s easy to say “try as much as possible to imitate the formatting of the story” but that’s not an option. Everything MUST be formatted to a prices definition and all the html for a “story” is part of the data stored. . So if you have formatted your own story page for the Stories tab, the tree View cannot change that. So, for example, if you were to incorporate a table that fills the width of the tab, it might well overflow the width of tree view, or your printed output. At the very least you would need to consider multiple displays when creating the Story in the first place. But, on the other hand, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, just perhaps beyond some people!

As a slight aside – are there things about the Tree View that you would change (rather than add to? I, for example, don’t see the need for the “Descendants of…” before each menu item and would remove it.

In the past this module was created for webtrees. But it was a simple exercise to port it over to kiwitrees, and rely on it’s original creator to maintain it. Now with it’s latest changes webtrees has moved so far from it’s original structure that is no longer possible. So I will need to maintain this module myself in kiwitrees now. Hence I am better able to consider improvements to it just for kiwitrees.

Nigel
My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info

1. If the field is NULL then do nothing. That narrative just needs to be written matching the contents of each field. BAP and CHR may share the same narrative text but will only be written if there is a value.
2. I could only help with English 🙂
3. I agree. If it happened to me that my story was not well formatted for the report I would go to that story and adjust it to suit. It depends on what people see as a priority.

Here’s another thought but may be difficult to include – I have notes attached to gedcom events that help explain the story around the event. Similarly I will add a media file to a gedcom event, say newspaper clipping, then I add a note to it that is the text of the clipping. I do this so search engines will pick up the text of the clipping. eg Marriage with newspaper notice.

Changes;

I would change the menu title to Families and the page title to Families of … or just have the name of the start person. It’s more personal, more representative and I wouldn’t really call the report a tree.

It might be an idea to allow notes to follow a gedcom narrative. I’m not sure which way to go here. I have always added notes to my events but since the last update I am now considering moving all my larger notes to Stories.

Hope this helps,

Jason

My tree

One thing I should mention here is that it has always been my aim to move this module into a replacement series of tools for the current “Reports” (which barely work and are ugly in the extreme).

This module is really a far better alternative to the “Ancestors” report.

But I have yet to decide quite how to incorporate all this module’s options (and maybe more) into a set of reporting tools, or if they can / should stand alone in admin. I guess it depends how many such tools will require extensive config options.

My general thought is to create ‘reports’ that work and look good online, but CAN be printed if required. That’s the opposite of the current reports which exist only for printing, but can (almost) be displayed online (badly).

I’m also firmly of the view that modern browsers have no need of a specific “PDF” print option within kiwitrees. Its a native element to all browsers now, I believe.

Nigel
My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info

The module works well as a Descendants report and would be beautiful as an ancestors report. I have relatives in their 70s who I would love to give a narrative descendant report backed with a narrative ancestor report. They read like a book and make sense. I agree the current ancestor report is ugly and practically unusable. It is difficult to make sense of.

My tree