DougG

No need to take that tone, Jim. I did look at the screen but got hung up on the "Print" option thinking that since it could be printed to a PDF and other targets, that's where the other formats should be found. "Save to File" was simply too obvious for me to see with the tunnel vision that I sometimes have.

Since I have used John Cardinal's "Second Site" since it first came out to "publish" my genealogical research, it has been many, many years since I tried generating a printed report from TMG and I am really rusty on the subject. But I was recently in contact with an elderly relation who has no Internet access and would like to produce a printout for her. What I am looking at is the Indented Descendant Narrative, and after a bit of experimentation I was able to get what I was essentially looking for as far as the textual content is concerned. However, I would like to include the primary personal photo of each individual as an embedded image in the document. The problem is that TMG just seems to have a general "Include exhibits" option that puts the exhibit/photo in-line with the text -- in this case immediately following the person's name. For photos, that is really ugly-looking. So is there a way to change the way that personal photos are handled in the report? Are there any third-party utilities that might produce reports in a more modern word-processor type format? Alternatively, is there a way to export the report directly in a standard document format such as Microsoft Word? If this can be done, I could manually edit it and insert the photos. Thanks for any tips on how to get the output that I'm looking for!

Is there any indication that a new version of GenBridge is on the way? I use the current version in my GedStar Pro Android product, but it does not support the V9 role changes. I didn't see anything in Bob's letter that would indicate further development on GenBridge.

I was able to accomplish my goal by using Michael's suggestion, although it seems really weird to have the "report writer" be the gateway to creating a new project. I was also thankful for my "Crashplan" online backup software, as the problems I was having with TMG did cause corruption and a missing DBF file. So I was able to use Crashplan to restore all the files in my project directory to the state they were in just prior to when I started messing with them. This was even easier than using the built-in backup/restore.

Thanks, Michael. I might try that and see how well it works -- especially since it would be a non-destructive process. I'll also be interested to see what it does with the external exhibits, custom flags and accent colors, etc. Would this also transfer or will I have to recreate customizations (the only accent I use is for indicating my direct-line ancestors/descendants)?

Unfortunately, it looks like some sort of internal error that I have no hope of debugging. I also hate to mess with it too much as it's already caused me to have to go through a database error recovery, etc. At least I worked out a way to exclude them from my SecondSite pages, which was one of my main objectives.

My TMG database goes back to when it was a DOS program (!) and my early days of genealogy when I wasn't very careful about things like sources and who I got my info from. Now I have identified a large group of 436 people who are interrelated but have been "cut off" from any relationship with the legitimate members of my family tree by removing some child-parent links. By using the List of People report to set a custom flag, I have all of these people flagged and can filter them in the Project Explorer, make them into a Focus Group, etc., but what I can't seem to do is to simply DELETE them from the database! One technique that was suggested was to Move them to a new dataset and then delete that dataset. Unfortunately, that doesn't work, as TMG fails on some sort of missing RULESET var and then hangs until aborted. Doing a Delete Persons against the filtered Project Explorer also doesn't work since it says that one or more has "relationships", which of course is true (within that group of people). TMG Help tells me that I can't delete a person until I delete all their tags, but that would be unbelievably tedious for 436 people (and no mass tag-delete function that I can see). So is there any way to do this? Doug Gordon

Per a couple others of us, you should be able to download and install the full version of 8.7 from the WG web site (after uninstalling the earlier version).

I was afraid of this after reading the release notes about database changes to roles, etc. GedStar Pro uses a version of GenBridge that is several years old, which has been working fine up to now, but I'm not surprised that this change has affected it in this way. Fortunately it doesn't crash or affect other data items, but instead of role names such as "Principal" and "Witness" it is returning what are probably indeces such as "00001" and "00002". I have not had much luck in recent years contacting Bob directly, so I was wondering if you can find out if there is an updated GenBridge that supports the new database (while maintaining compatibility with earlier database versions) and if I can be sent the new version if or when it becomes available. If there are no plans to update it, or if it will be way off in the future, please inform me of this so I can respond to my many users when they email-bomb me about this! For what it's worth, I tried using the store pages to get GenBridge there and take a look at it, but the store doesn't seem to work when trying to purchase something that's free (e.g., tried to use PayPal but then the transaction wouldn't finish without an non-zero amount). Thanks for your support!

Interestingly, that seems to be my only choice. When the update "backed out" of its installation, it apparently did a full removal of the original version! However, it did work.

I have the same problem. I saved the log file if anyone is interested. It's a bit long to just cut & paste here, so contact me at doug@wdgordon.com if you would like me to send it.

Now that I've released GedStar Pro for Android smartphones, I've already run into some dreaded character-code conversion issues. Android uses UTF-8 natively, so I have to encode accented characters, etc. into UTF-8 sequences. I've already solved this for GEDCOM files that are encoded in ANSI format, but for the direct TMG conversion I need to know how TMG stores character data internally. Since TMG produces valid ANSI GEDCOM files, I think I can assume that it internally uses single-character ANSI, and this is what I would be getting back via the GenBridge interface. I'm also going to assume (for now) that it is for the ISO-8859-1 code page, which will cover all Western European languages, and I doubt I have any users with other requirements at this time. Am I correct in this assumption? TMG character strings are single-character ANSI codes?

If I install TMG on my new notebook PC, but use that only when travelling and want my "master" database to remain on my desktop PC, what is the best way to transfer data back and forth? I guess I could just package up a .SQZ file and copy it between the PCs, but managing that could probably get to be tricky. Does anyone else do this, and what techniques do you use to keep from accidentally overwriting data?

I just got my first notebook PC and would like to install TMG on it so that I can use it for reference and do updates while travelling. I have two questions about this: 1) Does the TMG license permit me to install it on my notebook PC while still keeping in my desktop PC? It seems like most software products these days have loosened up on this, allowing you to install on multiple PCs as long as you are "using only one copy at a time", which would be the case. 2) I originally owned TMG 4 and have upgraded to every version since then. What do I have to do to install TMG 7 from scratch on my notebook, given that I don't have a pre-existing older version already installed. This is always one problem with purchasing product upgrades that require proof of previous ownership during installation: if you get a new PC or reformat your current PC, you end up scrambling to find old installation disks, registration keys, etc. By the way, the notebook is running Vista Home Premium.

I have a father-son relationship that has been doubtful in my mind for a long time. So I finally went to make a change and found that this relationship was already "disabled" (I assume that I did it a while back). When I run any sort of report from the person's father or higher, the son does not show up on the report as a descendant. The puzzling thing was that the relationship was still there in the tag list (i.e., Father-Bio, etc.), but it would not show up on reports. It took me quite a while to figure it out, but it turned out that there was a source citation on the relationship tag, and the certainty level under "1" was set to "-" instead of to the usual 0-3 range. Changing this to a digit makes the relationship show up on reports, setting it to "-" suppresses it. The question I have, since I don't remember setting it this way, is if there is some other way that this gets set. I couldn't find anything obvious on the main menus or right-click menus. Did I just read about it somewhere and manually set it, or is this a common feature that everyone knows about?