Use notes for biographies, transcriptions, research explanations, and other text that does not belong in a fact's date, place, or description. A person can have a general note as well as separate notes for facts and family information.

 

The note editor lets you enter text, and provides an array of commands to format and manipulate that text. The editor provides formatting options, spell checking, and access to the character map to insert special characters. The note editor has full unicode support to handle international characters. You can make parts of your notes private by surrounding private text with {curly brackets} – any text within curly brackets will be considered private, and will be ignored by printouts, GEDCOM export, and website generation, unless you tell the program to include them.

 

Opening and editing a note

There are three ways to add a note on the Edit Person form:

1.Selecting a fact then clicking the "Note" button on the edit panel

2.Clicking the Note column on the fact list

3.Select the Notes view on the left side menu - entries with an asterisk already contain note text; you can also select an entry without one to add a note

Click the monitor icon on the Edit Note toolbar to open the note in a separate window. You can resize this window to give yourself more room to write.

 

 

 

Click inside Edit Note to type or change text. When there are pending changes, a checkmark and a circle-with-slash button appear beside the Edit Note heading. Use the checkmark to accept the edits or the circle-with-slash button to discard the pending edits. Discarding restores the note as it was before those edits; it is not a command to remove an existing saved note. If the checkmark or discard buttons are not available in the note header, click on the back arrow to access them.

 

Live spell checking

RootsMagic uses the spell-check engine built into Windows or macOS. The available spelling languages depend on the languages installed in your operating system. To add support for another spelling language, use your operating system's language settings. The editor underlines words it does not recognize as you type. Right-click an underlined word to see suggested corrections at the top of the menu. Click the correct suggestion to replace that word. If the spelling is intentional, the menu also offers Add to Dictionary and Ignore All.

 

Selecting and formatting text

Highlight the text you want to format, then choose a command. The toolbar provides Bold, Italic, Underline, Cut, Copy, Paste, and Find. Right-click inside the note for additional editing commands.

The commands available are:

•Undo  Ctrl+Z - Reverses an edit

•Redo Ctrl+Y - Reapplies an edit that was undone

•Cut  Ctrl+X - Cuts (removes) the highlighted text and places it on the clipboard

•Copy  Ctrl+C - Copies the highlighted text to the clipboard

•Paste  Ctrl+V - Pastes the text on the clipboard to the cursor position

•Paste Unformatted - Pastes the text on the clipboard but removes any special formatting first

•Select All  Ctrl+A – select all the text in the note editor

•Find  Ctrl +F – allows you to find words or characters within the note

•Replace  Ctrl +H – find text and replace it with a different text

•Character Map  Ctrl+T – opens the character map to allow you to select special characters.

•Bold  Ctrl+B - Bolds the highlighted text

•Italics  Ctrl+I - Italicizes the highlighted text

•Underline  Ctrl+U - Underlines the highlighted text

•Format:

 Strikethrough (Ctrl+Shift+X) - draw a line through text

       Superscript (Ctrl+Shift+'=') - raise smaller characters above the line

 Subscript (Ctrl+'=') - lower characters below the line

 Small Caps (Ctrl+Shift+K) - display lowercase letters as small capitals

•Clear Formatting  Ctrl+Space - removes formatting from the selected text without removing the text itself.

The shortcut keys for Mac may be a little different in some cases. Here is a list of shortcut keys for both Windows and Mac.

 

Private text

•Put {curly brackets} around part of a note that you want to keep private. RootsMagic can leave that text out of reports, GEDCOM files, and websites. Before sharing, check the settings and the finished report or file: choosing to include private notes will include the bracketed text. Anyone who can open your RootsMagic database can still read it.