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Hi Nigel,

What are your thoughts on markdown? Would that be something you might consider for 1.4.4?

I currently have a mod in functions (expand_urls) that does:

2 NOTE httx://865987690.html [Use this as link text]

which ends up as [Use this as link text]
or simply to the user as

Note: [Use this as link text]

markdown’s syntax is [Use this as link text](httx://865987690.html) which my conversion code can easily accommodate. More importantly for me is markdown extra’s table generating syntax. I’m almost there with my conversion code being able to automatically create shared census notes. I’m either faced with trying to get the transcribed data into census assistant format (unique for each census year..) or generating a table from data tags I already have. markdown could be very handy,, I think..

Cheers,
Fred

I’m waiting to see how Greg implements it.

Could be OK or a complete disaster. If he tries to include it in modules like Stories, or FAQs it will be useless. They currently are able to include tables, images, and even javascript (I use that a lot to generate tabbed pages within a single “stories” page).

As for census – I don’t understand your issue. What’s wrong with the table layout of the Census Assistant we already have? That’s highly automated and extremely simple to use once you get used to it. If you allow free-form table entry on a site with multiple users – (like Stephen’s 100+ active users) how would you maintain a standard format?

How useful it is to the wider user-base will also depend how good any WYSIWYG editor it uses is. Traditionally markdown has tended to be more for “geeks” happy to type asterix, dashes and underscores for formatting. My grannie won’t want any of that, but she can use a WYSIWYG editor OK.

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

As for census – I don’t understand your issue. What’s wrong with the table layout of the Census Assistant we already have?

Probably not much and perhaps a better way to go. I’ll look more closely at census assistant.

For every census citation in addition to the census image, relevant place roll page etc info I also copy and save (copy/paste from the browser window) the transcribed index data items as displayed from the search. The resulting text file can easily be parsed yielding tag/data pairs for the items transcribed for a particular census. So I automatically have column headings and data for a shared census note – not much additional work to add markdown when the conversion code creates the shared note. To use census assistant I just probably need to map the tag/data pairs for each census into ca’s csv type format.

BTW, I want aggregated census shared notes based on census page, or perhaps a group of consecutive pages. Neighbors have proven to be an invaluable source of clues/information particularly on difficult individuals. The conversion code can pretty easily do the page grouping either based on citation page/roll/image etc or what’s even better in my case is to look for a common file name on the attached obje – the files are all named with census/roll/page.

To use census assistant I just probably need to map the tag/data pairs for each census into ca’s csv type format.

Currently Census Assistant has templates for all UK, US, and French census forms / years. I would be more than happy to work with anyone to add other countries if required. Each new country is a bit of work but worth it in my opinion.

Its also easy to improve the existing display / design for the data (see my own theme: http://www.our-families.info/note.php?nid=N109&ged=Osborne.ged

Note also the other advantage of this solution, that each of the table header elements has it’s own “hover tip” to provide full explanation of the often abbreviated titles.

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

Hi Nigel,

Had a quick look at wt 1.5.2 and 1.4.6 and it isn’t obvious to me if Greg implemented markdown. Did you see any git activity implementing markdown?

Cheers,
Fred

Ahh, found markdown in 1.5.2,, was looking in 1.4.6 and probably as expected not there.

The fact you had problem finding it is part of the problem as I see it. It’s a lot of extra code for something that I suspect 99% of users will never even be aware exists.
Technically it could have been put into w1.4.6, but I assume Greg doesn’t want to make it attractive for users to stay on that. There are quite a few other minor changes in 1.5 that could have been added to 1.4.6. I will be including most of those in the next release of kiwitrees (v 2.0)

There are also some issues with the way it works at present which I wouldn’t be happy with, such as this bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/webtrees/+bug/1278758

So at present I’d say its not worth the effort.

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