Memo Section

Overview

The Memo Section controls the appearance and formatting of name and event memos. This page also includes a description of how Second Site processes memo text.

Suppress Memo

The Suppress Memo property is used to enable or disable the display of memos. When checked, memo text is suppressed. When unchecked, which is the default, memos appear according to the rules associated with sentences and other formatting considerations.

If Suppress Memo is checked, the Names.Show Primary Name Memo property is ignored as are the remaining properties in the Memo Section.

Add Memo to Sentence

The Add Memo to Sentence property controls how Second Site handles name and event memos when there is no [M] variable in the sentence. There are two choices: "Append" and "Do Not Append".

If you choose Append, which is the default, the contents of the memo are appended to the end of the sentence if the sentence does not include the [M] variable. Use [M0] (em-zero) to hide the memo for specific sentences.

If you choose Do Not Append, the contents of the memo are only displayed via one or more of the Memo variables ([M], [M1], etc.).

Suppress Relationship Memo

If the Suppress Relationship Memo property is checked, which is the default, relationship tag memos are suppressed. If the Suppress Relationship Memo property is unchecked, the relationship memo is shown. Relationship memos appear in the children section of the person page entry of the parent after the lifespan of the child. The child must be included in the site.

Formatting Rules

Second Site formats memo text according to the following rules.

1. Second Site honors TMG's printer codes, so memos can contain [:CR:], [:TAB:], [:BOLD:], etc., to format text.
2. If a memo contains a sequence of multiple spaces, they will not be visible in the browser view of the page. The spaces will be present in the HTML file, but the browser will reduce them to a single space; that's the proper way to handle those characters as described in the HTML specification.
3. Tab characters in the memo will be treated the same as the [:TAB:] printer code: Second Site will write 5 non-breaking spaces to the output file. Second Site will not leave the tab character as is because tabs are ignored in HTML files, as described in the HTML specification. The 5 non-breaking spaces are not an ideal solution but they work reasonably well for indenting the first word in a paragraph, which is the most common use of tabs in TMG memos.
4. Carriage-return characters are treated the same as the [:CR:] printer code: Second Site will write a "<br>" tag in the HTML output. There is one exception: any carriage return characters inside the [HTML:] and [:HTML] printer codes will be output as is. HTML ignores carriage returns, so a carriage return inside the [HTML:] and [:HTML] codes will have no effect in the browser view of the page.
5. You can include HTML tags in the memo for advanced formatting. If you can get the result you want using TMG's printer codes, then stick with that; the memo will look good in both TMG reports and Second Site output. If you want a specific format that you can't achieve with TMG's printer codes, then use HTML, but understand that TMG's reports won't honor the HTML unless you output to an HTML file.

Please note that the rules above apply to most of the text Second Site reads from the TMG project, including event memos but also other text such as internal text exhibits.