Friday, February 11, 2011

Italicizing Source material in RootsMagic 4

One of the neat "tricks" I learned about RootsMagic 4 from the Sources, Citations and Documentation with RootsMagic webinar (broadcast 4 February, see link here) was that text in Source templates could be italicized. 

That means that Free-form source citations can have italicized words and phrases.  This is important to me, because all of my source citations are in Free-form citation templates (which just provide fields for Footnote, Short Footnote and Bibliography format. where the user edits each field in RootsMagic without an automatic source creation).  As some genealogists know, many Evidence! Explained models show italicized words and phrases in certain fields.  The "Template Sources," basic mainly on Evidence! Explained models, provide these automatically, of course.

Here is the process:

1)  In a Free-form Source template (I'm using the one for Isaac Seaver's Birth again as in past posts):


I want to italicize the Title of this Book, so I highlight, with my mouse, the book title in the Footnote field, as shown above.  I then right-click (in Windows) and the editing feature list opens, which includes Bold, Italics and Underlined:


I chose "Italics" and the text I had highlighted was now italicized.  I went ahead and italicized the book title in the Short Footnote and Bibliography fields also.  The final product looks like this:

 
The source citations from my RootsMagic 4 screen shows:

Footnote:
Systematic History Fund, Vital Records of Westminster, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849 (Worcester, Mass.: F.P. Rice, 1908), Page 83.

Short Footnote:
Systematic History Fund, Vital Records of Westminster, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849, Page 83.

Bibliography:
Systematic History Fund, Vital Records of Westminster, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849. Worcester, Mass.: F.P. Rice, 1908.


That takes a little work to do, but it results in the correct formatting, which gets transferred via a GEDCOM export to other programs or online databases that can recognize the formatting.  for example, Ancestry.com, as shown in RootsMagic 4 Source Citations Uploaded via GEDCOM to Ancestry.com - a Surprise!

Stay tuned for more in the Seaver Source Citation Saga!

1 comment:

Jen said...

HTML tags also work in the source templates (free form and in template fields).