Jesper

Hi Bjørn It is quite likely that it will appear again. Since upgrading to 6.07, I have had the same error more than a couple of times at startup, but I never experienced any corruption of my data. I have no idea what causes the error, but I could suspect it is related to the use of foreign languages. It happens during program initialisation where a large number of files are being opened and it looks like a pointer has been corrupted (maybe by some external program) so that unexpected data are being read and causing the overflow. I have not systematically checked what prior activity I had on the computer before the error. There are just too many possibilities. And as you said, you only need to restart TMG and everything works again. Jesper

Robin and Ken You are right, Robin. This is what I meant. Good language is important to me in narrative reports, and it is difficult enough, to maintain a sense of natural language style. The use of alternative Place Style for the same place would help a lot and still maintain data persistence in the MPL. I personally don't have a lot of places that change name over the years, set aside trivial spelling variations. It seems to be more stable than person names. But I see you point. It will not automatically be solved with the extended use of Place Styles, but maybe there would be a work around. If there were Place Styles attached to tags, you could put the alternative name in say L10 and then have two Place Styles for that one place. One would use the normal name and the other would use the alternative name. This would be OK as long as the alternative name was confined to one maybe two elements of the place description. But I guess this would cover most cases, wouldn't it? Thanks for all you comments. Jesper

It seems that output to VCF is not edited for multiple spaces. I have name styles with e.g. [GivenName] [OtherName] [LastName]. Many of my older ancestors used farmnames etc. extensively and the [OtherName] is a good place to put those names that are not official last names and not official given names. When printing people that do not have an [OtherName] content the above style will produce two consecutive spaces between given name and last name. All printed reports seem to be formatted to eliminate these double spaces, but not so in VCF. All names in printed Box Charts have double spaces. Is it possible to strip the names of extra spaces before sending them on to the VCF?

A bug has been discussed and reported some time ago in the TMG-L list. It was reported that when using the F3 in the last name field, the SortLast field was left blank. It seems to me that it is not the use of the F3 that causes this behaviour but rather a problem appearing when the focus has been lost in the last Surity column (M) using the tab key. When tabbing from the Firstname field through all the surities to the Lastname field, the SortLast field does not get updated. If you stop using the tab (and use the mouse cursor or down arrow instead) the update works OK. This was just a small hint. I think the bug has been reported anyway.

With the introduction of the error message when you try to override a place style in the Tag Entry screen, I frequently get reminded that I am trying to use TMG in a way, it seems not to be designed for. I am also beginning to wonder if this is really the best way to handle place styles. The place style concept is a wonderful tool for merging 10 very different place elements into a meaningful place identifier and it is even more powerful for contextualizing the place information, i.e. presenting the place in different forms depending on the context. I often use a full and rather long place name (including town, county, etc.) in the first tag and then I prefer not to repeat the same long place name over and over again in the following tags, but refer only refer to the town or maybe the house or dwelling. This much in line with the source notation: "Hereafter referred to as...". I know I could use the [L1-10] variables to construct my own "place style" in the sentence structure, but the number of tags for each person differs and I definitively prefer to use standard sentence structures as much as possible. I my opinion, a better way would be to have the place style attached to the tag and not to the master place list (MPL). As it is now, the place style is only used to format one occurrence of the place information, the MPL. If it was attached to the tag, I would give us the option to have all kinds of narrative references to the same place in MPL expressed in different ways. After all, the references may change, but the place remains the place. Am I completely wrong in this? If not, would it be a useful addition to the wish list? Jesper

It seems that there is a small bug in the add person form. The form contains Name and Birth tags. Name uses custom made style. When entering given name then surname, both sort fields are automatically updated (SortGiven, SortSurname) as expected. When entering surety value(s) between the names (i.e. Given name, then surety value, then Surname) only the SortGiven field is automatically updated. Jesper

I have done extensive changes to the local Danish language to bring it up to an understandable level and in line with my personal requirements for accepted genealogy and computer terms. It has involved changing more than 10.000 sentences (there are more than 15.000 entries), which would have been quite impossible inside TMG. Instead I export the language file, use a DBF tool to do the changes and import the .dbf file back into TMG. I am using a simple and cheap program (dbfviewer 2000) which has all the search functions needed as well as find and replace function. It works very well. Jesper

The files you list as being used in ../Program Files/.. are data files used by TMG to control and store appearance, language and - surely - your data during and between sessions. I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about security issues to comment your concerns, but most applications I use, have data files open during execution!? Jesper

This is strange. Which run-time files are you referring to? In my installation, the session related runtime files are located in "..\Local Settings\Temp" in a seperate directory. Every individual session has its own set of runtime files. Are you installing on a non-english version of Windows XP? Jesper

Thank you for your help. Jesper

I know it is a known issue, because I started the original thread, but I never read your reply due to the breakdown. Could you please repeat your answer Thanks for clarifying the other issue also. Jesper

Hello again. From Terry's list, here is my question: 4) The conditional brackets do not work for the father [FATH] and mother [MOTH] sentence variables. Even with the conditionals, the "unknown person" phrase appears. The sentence looks like this: [P+] was born illegitimate <by [MOTH]> <[D]> <[L]>. <The father was identified as [FATH]><. [M]> and the output (name removed by me): John Doe (199). John Doe (199) was born illegitimate by an unknown person on 22 May 1902 at Fredericia, Vejle amt. The father was identified as an unknown person . Incidently, why is it that every first sentence that does not start with [P], will have the primary name tag printing [P] anyway ( maybe this is a new topic). Jesper