book-latex

Summary

The book-latex.ll report program produces a file that, once processed with LaTeX, renders a very book-like descendant (or ancestor) report with a type-set appearance. This report program is based in part upon an earlier report program, register-tex.

What's New

I fixed book-latex so that it can render harmless those characters meaningful to the LaTeX system. In most cases this amounts to just preceeding the special character with a backslash. This is done by wrapping any text output (coming from the user's database) with a function that acts as a filter. It echoes safe characters, and transforms the others.

Additionally, an option was added to supress e-mail addresses of source authors (when the e-mail address is given as a subnode of the AUTHor node using the EMAI tag). In the code of this program, tabs have been replaced with spaces to help ensure consistent indenting (which helps make the code easier to follow).

book-latex.ll

• updated 18 Jun 2004
  
• updated 14 Jul 2004 (spelling changes, slight changes in comments, and one change in the order of user questions)

This enhanced report is now available in the CVS reports repository. Or, if you like, here's a direct link to the book-latex.ll log from which you can click on 'download' to obtain the most up-to-date copy. Feel free to e-mail me about any bugs.

• The spelling of "descendants" wasn't completely fixed. A few "-ents" are still present.

Samples

Here are some samples (note how the e-mail addresses are blocked in the bibliographies):

Both of these charts use of George W. Bean, son of Timothy Bean, as an ancestor of L.L. Bean. This George W. Bean might be an uncle to the actual ancestral George W. Bean, son of Kimball Bean, son of Timothy. There are conflicting sources.


• L.L. Bean's ancestors
• Jonathan Bean's descendants

Short Users Guide

A short sequence of questions is asked:

Enter the first person for the report

Pressing return with no input will get you out of the program.




Enter another root person or none to proceed

Yes, you can have ancestor or descendant reports for multiple people
Just press return with no input when done entering additional people.




Enter 0 for descendant, 1 for ancestor report

Max generations for descendancy books

Book Text: 1='1 TEXT'; 2=all '1 NOTE'; 3 = !-tagged '1 NOTE'

This specifies where the narrative details on individuals come from.




Not asked: Enter 1 to reset place name table each generation, 0 to not

The place name table helps in determining whether a place has already been mentioned so that it can be referred to using only the first part of the place name on subsequent uses.
(1) Resetting the table at each generation may cause a frequently occuring place name to be fully specified more often, but that may be better than leaving the reader guessing what a town's name by itself refers to several generations into a report.
(0) But if almost all of a family branches activity happens in the same county, then it would be fine to only mention the full place name (city, county, state -- for instance) when it first occurs.




Enter 1 to show source authors' e-mail addresses, 0 to not

If 0 is chosen, then any e-mail addresses (EMAI subnodes of AUTH nodes) are shown as "e-mail address on file."





What is the name of the output file?

Just make sure your filename ends in .tex




Enter the author(s) of this document

Pressing return with no input skips this question.




Enter the place for the copyright notice:

Pressing return with no input skips this question.




File that contains introduction (if any)

Pressing return with no input skips this question.

To process the outputfile, one just has to 'typeset' the document. On Unix systems, with a LaTeX package installed, this is just a matter of issuing a few commands.
Here's an excerpt from the comments in the program:

** The output is in LaTeX format.  Therefore, the name of the output file
** should end in ".tex".  To print (assuming the name of the output file is
** "out.tex"):
**      latex out      < ignore lots of warnings about underfull \hboxes >
**      makeindex out  < not all systems have makeindex available
**                       if yours is one, just remove the \input{file.ind} line
**                       from the LaTeX output and skip the 'makeindex'>
**      latex out      < repeat latex-ing to get cross-references resolved>
**      latex out      < needed to get the index into the TOC>   
**                     < you may need to repeat more if Latex  
**                       says so, e.g. if page refs change. >
**      dvips out
**      lpr out.ps
**                     < the last three commands here may be replaced by >
**                       pdflatex out    -- if you have 'pdflatex' and a PDF is
**                       the desired final product >