pfagan

Virgina, thanks for your kind words. My fan charts were originally Visual Chartform, but I "printed to" .PDF output and and brought the the PDFs into Adobe Illustrator to fix up. Then re-exported to PDF. I think fan charts are an incredibly helpful way for non-technical relatives to understand the big picture. Patty

Replying to my own post because I worked out a procedure to get the characters I want in a plaintext descendant file. I'm posting it here in case anyone else has a similar problem. 1. Output a descendant chart to Rich Text format. 2. Open the RTF file in Word. Copy the contents to the clipboard. After step 2, everything is done in a text editor with macro capability. I use PC/TextPad for this but others might work as well. 3. Open a blank text file and save as PC format with DOS encoding. 4. Paste the contents of the RTF file into the empty DOS text file. This should preserve all the line drawing characters you saw in Word, but you still need to replace them with characters that will persist when you save to the more generic ANSI encoding. 5. Still in DOS mode, write and run a macro to replace the characters you see with |, , --, etc. directly from the keyboard. 6. Save as ANSI encoding. The keyboard characters are old-school, but they hold the proper meaning.

I'm an old TMG 4 user and I'm trying to recreate my old reports in TMG8. In the old version, to get the correct line characters in an ASCII Descendancy chart, I had to alter the TMG.INI file to define the line characters I wanted,like this: LINES="/-\|+|\-/-|" Is there a similar adjustment I can make in TMG8? This illustrates the output I'm getting from TMG8 with both | and \ characters replaced by asterisks.. Because it's not a one-for-one replacement, I can't simply search and replace to fix in a text editor. Catherine M. FA +John MCCAFFREY, *-- Helen J. MCC *-- John J. MCCA *-- Catherine (M +Michael HAN *-- Edward T The old version would output this. Catherine M. (FA +John MCCAFFREY, |-- Helen J. MCC |-- John J. MCCA \-- Catherine (M +Michael HAN \-- Edward T Best Patty Fagan

Many thanks, Terry and Virginia! You've answered most of my questions. It's clear that it would be a mistake to confine myself to a 32-bit OS to maintain my current reports. I do have a couple other report-related questions. I'm trying to rebuild my old v4 Word reports in v7 to see if I can find an HTML solution for the interim period. I have a favorite custom Family Group Sheet report that is all inclusive: all events for parents and children. It actually looks just like the Individual Detail report, only extended to the whole family. The problem is that I can't find a way to export a Family Group report or Individual Detail to HTML in TMG7. That being so, I would have no means to produce that report in TMG7 and 64-bit Win7. The manual says that TMG7 can only export four reports as HTML. Is there some other way to get HTML output for my Family group sheet. A 3rd-party report generator? And have you any idea when TMG8 will be available? Best Patty Fagan

My old XP computer needs to be replaced and I am trying to decide whether to install 32-bit or 64-bit Windows 7 OS when I buy a new machine. I would like 64-bit, but TMG 7's lack of Word or RTF report export is a major concern for me. I've read the three options for those of us who use Word and the least painful (for me) would be running TMG under XP Mode. So I am fishing for opinions from anyone who has been running TMG7 in XP Mode. Is it difficult to set up? Is it stable? Any words of advice are welcome. I'd also like to know if there is any way to port my old custom reports from TMG4.

Hello, I am running TMG version 4.0d gold in Windows XP. Several years ago I purchased version 5, but the lack of report generator (and inability to port my custom reports) convinced me not to upgrade. (Yes, I know they were added later, but I wasn't able to devote time to the project when TMG was ready.) Now I am thinking of buying a new computer -- a laptop running Vista. Can anyone tell me if version 4 will run in Vista? I am also concerned with the laptop screen sizes. Will version 4's fixed aspect map properly within a small wide screen? There must be someone out there in the same problem. I'd be grateful for any feedback. Thanks Patty Fagan Boston, Mass