Several places in Pedigree Forge accept styled text: Project Notes, Person Notes, and Source Text. Click the pencil icon to open the full Rich Text Editor.
The toolbar provides standard formatting — bold, italic, underline — plus several features specific to genealogy.
The insert button on the toolbar — the one marked with a + — adds the things you cannot simply type. Most are inline constructs, each showing a short marker in the text with the real detail held behind it:
The last two are not inline at all but sit between paragraphs, occupying a line of their own:
Both can also be inserted by right-clicking in the text. Neither can go inside a table cell, which holds ordinary text only.
Only a Hyperlink is drawn as a link — coloured and underlined — because a hyperlink is the only one of these that goes anywhere. The other inline constructs sit on a lightly shaded background instead, in the manner of a word processor’s fields: enough to show they are more than ordinary text, without dressing a footnote or a place up as a web address. The shading marks them on screen only and never appears in a printed or exported report.
Hovering over any of them describes what it is, and the value behind it where there is one. To change one later, right-click it — the menu offers an edit command named for what it is, for example Edit footnote… or Edit merge field…. Where following a construct actually leads somewhere — a hyperlink, or a citation whose source is in your file — the menu also offers to open it, and Ctrl+click does the same.
Most of these show you a result rather than what is stored behind it: a merge field shows its current value, a place its name, a footnote a marker standing in for a number not yet assigned. To see what is actually there, use the Show field codes button on the toolbar, in the manner of a word processor. Each construct then displays its stored form between guillemets — a place reads as «@Chichester, Sussex», a footnote as «^the text of the note» — and pressing the button again switches back.
The setting belongs to the editor you switched it on in, and changes the display only; nothing about your data is altered either way. Index entries, special commands and hyperlinks are unaffected, because what they show is already what you typed.
A merge field embeds a live value from your data in the text — like a mail-merge field in a word processor. Instead of typing a person’s birth date into a note, insert a merge field for it: the note always shows the current value, and if you later correct the date, every note, report, and export picks up the change automatically.
To insert one, use the insert button on the toolbar and choose Merge field. A field takes its value either from a record in your file or from one of a small set of functions, chosen by the pair of buttons at the top of the dialog.
For a Record field:
For a Function, pick one from the list. A function takes its value from the calendar or from the computer rather than from your data, so there is nothing else to fill in.
Either way, Value shows a live preview of what the field currently resolves to.
The inserted field displays its current value. Hover over it to see the underlying expression, and right-click for Edit merge field… to change it. To see the expressions instead of the values, use Show field codes as described above — a field then displays as, for example, «I51.birth.date».
Some details worth knowing:
A handful of functions cover today’s date — whole, or just the year, the month, the day, or the day of the week — and the name you are signed in to this computer as. The list in the dialog is the whole of it, and each entry says plainly what it gives, so there is nothing to look up.
What makes them worth having is that they are worked out afresh every time they are shown or printed. A report carries the date it was produced rather than the date somebody typed it in, which is what a title page wants, and there is nothing to remember to update. A note containing today’s date quietly says something different tomorrow — that is the point of it rather than a fault.
Functions belong to merge fields alone; the query language does not use them. Revealing the field codes shows one written in the manner of a spreadsheet, as «@today()».
The editor supports tables for structured information. Use the table buttons on the toolbar to insert, resize, and format tables.
Right-clicking inside a table offers the table commands: inserting and deleting rows and columns, and three settings marked with a star while they are on:
Most toolbar buttons act as toggles — click once to enable, click again to disable. Select text first to apply formatting to existing content.