Gramps 5.1.1 on MacOS 10.13.6
Not sure if they’ve just appeared or they’ve always been there and I am too stupid to notice, but in my file in the Relationships view, there is an asterisk * preceding DOB for the primary person in the view, except “spouse”, which has oo preceding DOB.
Searched the Nabble forum and waded through the User Manual and found nothing.
Is this normal?
New feature in Gramps 5.1.x that “Allows you to use Genealogical symbols instead of text abbreviations in reports, charts and the Gramps interface.” and is managed from the Genealogical Symbols tab setting in edit>preferences see:
So the asterisk “*” means “Birth” and overlapping or side by side “OO” means “Marriage”.
Thanks,
Do you mean Gramps/Preferences/Genealogical Symbols? I checked there and found that the Use Symbols box had NOT been selected. I tried to select it, intending to reverse it immediately, but found that the box could not be selected at all!
Is there something else I should check?
Hello Dexter,
Do you mean Gramps/Preferences/Genealogical Symbols? I checked there
and found that the Use Symbols box had NOT been selected. I tried to
select it, intending to reverse it immediately, but found that the box
could not be selected at all!
What happens when you press the ‘Select font’ button?
My guess is that you’ll find that a notice is presented to you about the
lack of fontconfig module for python 3.
In Debian, the relevant package (python3-fontconfig) no longer exists in
sid or testing.
Hello Dexter,
Do you mean Gramps/Preferences/Genealogical Symbols? I checked there
and found that the Use Symbols box had NOT been selected. I tried to
select it, intending to reverse it immediately, but found that the box
could not be selected at all!
Further info…
Experimentation here indicates that the the Use symbols box can only be
selected when suitable fonts are available(1). Until then, you have *,
+, oo, etc. There is no way to stop those being displayed, other than
by selecting ‘use genealogical symbols’. So, there’s always some form
of symbol to see.
(1) I had to install python3-fontconfig from Debian stable and ask Gramps
to find any suitable fonts. Once that was done, I removed
python3-fontconfig. Of course, I can no longer search for suitable
fonts, but the ones already known to Gramps aren’t lost.
The new symbol scheme is a little misleading. The views all use genealogical symbols. The two options are a non graphical (standard text) or a graphical (unicode) symbol. The default is non graphical.
To use graphical, you must first see if there is a font on your system that contains the symbols so you click the “Try to Find” button. Once the “Choose Font” is populated, you can check the “Use Symbols” check box.
Thanks,
I can’t find a “Select Font” button on my screen. I can only see “Use symbols” and “Try to find” buttons.
Well, font config didn’t go so well for me either!
Terminal report pasted below:
Last login: Wed Jan 8 07:03:55 on console
Dexters-iMac:~ dexterboneham$ sudo easy_install Python-fontconfig
Password:
Searching for Python-fontconfig
Reading https://pypi.python.org/simple/Python-fontconfig/
Best match: Python-fontconfig 0.5.1
Processing Python-fontconfig-0.5.1.tar.gz
Writing /tmp/easy_install-IGxAZf/Python-fontconfig-0.5.1/setup.cfg
Running Python-fontconfig-0.5.1/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-IGxAZf/Python-fontconfig-0.5.1/egg-dist-tmp-ifwTXI
fontconfig.c:235:10: fatal error: ‘fontconfig/fontconfig.h’ file not found
#include “fontconfig/fontconfig.h”
**^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~**
1 error generated.
error: Setup script exited with error: command ‘cc’ failed with exit status 1
Thanks Dave,
I’m not trying to select graphical display of relationships - I’m trying to use the text display.
On my system, it seems to have defaulted to graphic and I don’t seem to be able to select it back to text.
As described above, the “Select” button (for graphic/text display) is inactive, so I can’t even try cycling it between graphic and text displays.
Hello Dexter,
I can’t find a “Select Font” button on my screen. I can only see “Use
symbols” and “Try to find” buttons.
Okay, I got the name wrong. What happens when you press it?
Nada. It’s inactive.
As I stated above, there is no text option. The two options are symbols from a standard keyboard or symbols using unicode graphical symbols.
To use text requires a hack of the code.
In the program code find \gramps\gen\utils\symbols.py
There will be two groupings of code with column headers NAME, UNICODE, SUBSTITUTION
Edit the column SUBSTITUTION with the text you want displayed.
Once saved, you will need to relaunch Gramps for the change to take affect.
You need to install both the fontconfig and python-fontconfig packages.
I can’t say I’m thrilled with the Genealogical Symbols either. The implementation lacks the granular control seen in the rest of Gramps. It’s all about more efficient use of GUI screen space. [Forgot to note that Symbols simplify Internationalization too!]
Part of the problem is that the OSes do auto-substitution if the font being used doesn’t have a glyph defined for the UNICODE character the programmer chose as the symbol of a genealogical situation. But the font selected for the substitution is arbitrary with some being outsized or grotesque. On the other hand, if we find a Font with a better glyph for a particular symbol, that font has to be applied across ALL text in the GUI. It can’t be applied to JUST the genealogical symbols or, better yet, only one of those symbols.
But to my mind, the unforgivable thing about the genealogical symbol implementation is that the GLYPHS have no universally understood meaning.
As frequent USERS of Gramps, we’ll eventually learn the meaning of the symbols. But our readers will actually need a symbol key for reports generated with Symbols. (Asterisk means ‘birth’?!? That’s completely arbitrary. Asterisk means footnote in standard reference typography & wildcard in most computer use.) Only the male/Mars & female/Venus symbols are relatively unambiguous & part of the vernacular. (Introduced for plant genders by Carl Linnaeus in 1751 but more commonly known from the cultural influence of Astrology.)
The Symbol List:
Hello Brian,
But to my mind, the unforgivable thing about the genealogical symbol
implementation is that the GLYPHS have no universally understood
meaning.
To me, the worst thing is that the symbols (or substitutions) can’t be
turned off completely. Even then, it’s not a big deal.
I know I could hack the code and replace the ‘SUBSTITUTION’ parts with
nulls, but them I’m into maintaining code.
I’d write a patch to offer the choice of ‘Do Not Use Symbols’. Sadly,
my coding ability doesn’t stretch that far.
Perhaps we should limit the symbol font to symbols only.
Whilst the symbols may not be universal, they are widely used and understood. Tamura Jones provides some advice in this web page. The unicode section is particularly relevant to us.
You need to install both the fontconfig and python-fontconfig packages.
@Nick-Hall, does the above mean the wiki needs correction?
See:
The wiki section pounds pretty hard on the Prerequisites. Perhaps that indicates a deficiency that could be addressed in the code? Like giving a pop-up warning if the prerequisite programs haven’t been installed?
The python-fontconfig package is optional. If you choose to install it then you will have to install all its dependencies. From the error log given it looked like the fontconfig was missing.
Attempting to get my head around it… fontconfig is the prerequisite (for Genealogical Symbols preferences or in general?) but python-fontconfig is optional?
If fontconfig is a dependency (part & parcel) of the usual python-fontconfig then the wiki should be talking about the Python wrapper instead of how it is now?
The prerequisite is python-fontconfig, but this requires fontconfig and its dependencies.
However, fontconfig and its python bindings are listed as optional packages in the README.