Importing notes

[james logan]

I am trying to import notes onto the notes field of a family member. The notes I am trying to import were scanned onto my desktop. After I open the file I want to import, I get a note saying something like, "your file exceeds 1,0000,000 characters and will be reduced." After clicking this button, all that appears in my notes field are 2 or 3 characters that look something like Mandarin Chinese...any ideas what I am doing wrong?

Jim

[David G. Kanter]

I am trying to import notes onto the notes field of a family member. The notes I am trying to import were scanned onto my desktop. . . .
JimAs you say the notes had been scanned, might you be trying to import directly from a resulting graphic file (JPEG, TIFF, etc.)--rather than a plain text file? (A scan normally results in a graphic file and you'd need then to perform an optical character recognition [OCR] on that file to convert it into text.) The Manual says "The Import Notes button lets you import plain text files of up to 64,000 characters directly from disk into any note field. . . ." (Search the Manual for "importing notes" to see the full text.)

Or perhaps your souce file is a text file, but either in the native format of your word-processor program or is a rich-text-format (RTF) text file. If that's the case, try resaving it in your word-processor program with a type of Text and then attempt the import.

[james logan]

Thank you very much for trying to help me. You were correct in assuming that this was a .jpg file. I read your instructions carefully, and must admit I am still confused.

You suggested that I need to make this a plain text file in order to import properly. Just exactly what is a plain text file and how do I change scanned notes from a book into a plain text file? The manual instructions claim one can transfer from a disk...can't I transfer from my desktop? I am missing something obvious here...I transferred the page of notes to a word processing sheet and still had no luck.

Thank you for your patience with me!
Jim

[saoi]

You suggested that I need to make this a plain text file in order to import properly. Just exactly what is a plain text file and how do I change scanned notes from a book into a plain text file?...A plain text file is what Text-Edit puts out as native format and almost any word processing program can do if you look in its capabilities to 'save as…'

A .jpg is a picture. To get it as real text you need to consider one of three possibilities.

One: A program which can scan that photo and try to read it as text. There are a number of programs which can do that but all of the ones which I'm familiar with are commercial and even then don't always work as well as you would like. These programs are called OCR (for Optical Character Recognition) programs and often a reduced feature version of an OCR program is included with your Scanner software.

Two: A do it yourself project where *You* retranscribe those notes. Time consuming but potentially useful. I would still keep the 'original'.

Three: Leaving it as a picture and letting everyone view it and read it if that's possible for them to do.

rich

[John Hill]

Three: Leaving it as a picture and letting everyone view it and read it if that's possible for them to do.Unfortunately AFAIK it isn't - not in the Notes field, anyway, which can only accept text.
John (Bournemouth)

[David G. Kanter]

Three: Leaving it as a picture and letting everyone view it and read it if that's possible for them to do.Unfortunately AFAIK it isn't - not in the Notes field, anyway, which can only accept text.That's true, but you can accomplish #3 by linking the JPEG file to the Family Card as a Multimedia item under either of the person tabs or under the family tab, as applicable. Then the picture of the text you have made by scanning can be easily viewed within Reunion.

Furthermore, but dependent on just what you scanned and its readability at a smaller size, if you create Web Family Cards and enable the "Web Media Page" option, the picture would then be viewed--along with whatever other information you define in your Layout--by anyone with a browser, whether you post the Web Family Cards to the Web or otherwise distribute them (e.g., by CD).

In any case, your decision to scan the Source document is a good one as you now have an electronic version as backup to the paper copy.