Gotty

I am truly appalled by John Cardinal's response about those who don't upgrade being the leading cause of the demise of TMG. I've been using and upgrading TMG for 20 years, and I check at least once a year for a new version. So I checked last month, only to discover that a new version had been released. I was saddened to read that it was the end of TMG, but absolutely shocked (actually, grossly insulted) to hear that my loyalty over the years had been snubbed and I could not upgrade to the new version. The "burden" (as mentioned in a previous post) to keep up-to-date is one which for which WhollyGenes must take some of the initiative - particularly if the business model is so dependent on people buying the newest version. Yet, in all the years I've had TMG I've never once had a notification to tell me a new version was available (and yes, I've double checked that my main email address is registered with them, and no, I don't have any anti-spam enabled, and no, I never delete emails so can be sure that I've not been notified). Sure, if TMG was the only software I ever used, and it was run on my computer every day, I might be expected to check regularly for a new version. But TMG is only one of 86 programs that I use, and then only when I am able to devote the time to continue my research. Even then, at least with TMG, I would never move to the first release of a new version (I've been bitten twice by upgrading in this way). Programs don't last forever, of course, but to prevent loyal users from upgrading to the final version is truly a disgrace.

To make some complicated displays easier to read I really need to provide some accenting based on the tag type. There seem to be criteria for accenting based on just about anything, but I can see nothing that allows me to accent according to the tag type. For instance, I've created a tag called "Cens-Household", which nicely accents the tag itself in Person View if the subject is a witness, but I'd like to accent the Name/Place column whether or not the person is a witness. I'd like to accent occupations, birth/marriage/death etc in a similar way. How does one do this? (from a user of TMG for what seems like a lifetime). It'd be nice if the tag-type itself could highlight, but that one I can live without. TIA

I use accents a lot, and would dearly like to be able to use the name of a tag as a criterion in the "Accent condition". But there doesn't seem to be any "Field" to do this. I'd expect something like "Any Event tag; Type" or just "Type" (but the list ends at "Son's Name group; Title") Is there some other criterion buried in that list that would do this?

Thanks, Terry. However, I did realise that there are a number of workarounds (and I'd rather not have another flag for it). But since the tag filter seems to have just about everything except the inside-leg measurement of the principle <grin> it would seem an odd thing not to be there.

In Person View, the Event "Type" column title is stuck on "Filtered" regardless of which project I open (even if I create a new project from scratch). But I'm not filtering the events! I can filter the Event Tags and it works, but if I then select Edit | Clear Tag Filter, the column title still shows "Filtered". I can only assume that something in the global "Program Options" is causing this. But I can see nothing that should do this, nor does there seem to be any help in the Help.

I've been an Advanced User for a very long time <grin> But thanks for the right-click tip ... for some reason "Filter for non-witnessed events" was selected. In fact, Preferences | Program Options | Tag Box showed "Show Witnessed Events" as unticked. There's clearly some inconsistency in wording/logic that can be confusing here. Thanks again

I frequently need to rescale a chart that perhaps just runs over a page boundary, or to get a big chart onto a smaller piece of paper. But VC handles scaling erratically and illogically. If, for instance, I have a chart that runs across 4x4 pages and I want to reduce it to 1x1, I choose Tools|Diagram|Resize Drawing, enter a new width or height (direction-horizontal or direction-vertical in terms of the dialog) and yes, the drawing resizes, but the interconnecting lines and the boxes do strange things. Sometimes the lines overlap the boxes, they end up with strange kinks (or double kinks) in them for no obvious reason, and the text, boxes and distances don't scale at the same rate, so that the text (while perfectly readable) overlaps the boxes. I would expect a "resize" function to do nothing but simply rescale everything exactly the same amount, so that what gets printed is simply a smaller version of the original, rather than something that looks very different. And it's not just with a big "resize", but even doing a small one just to fit a slightly oversised chart onto a page results in unpredictable behaviour. So my conclusion is that this is not the way to make a drawing fit on a page. So what is?

I have a 13 generation ancestral chart (only one line goes back that far, the others go back only 7 generations) which wants to print across 3x2 sheets of A3 paper. For research planning purposes I want to put this onto a single A3 sheet (I never incorporate pictures in my charts) so I "resize drawing" to fit 39cm width. I've attached two sample images, one is from the chart as generated by default, the second is what happened after reducing by 33% (it's by no means the worst example, but it shows the four mis-scaling effects best ... font scaling clipping the glyph bounding boxes (line spacing isn't being adjusted in proportion), failure of the boxes to scale correctly (the h/w ratio ought to remain the same through the scaling), failure of the text to fit in the box and the weird connecting lines. The same effects can be observed even on simple charts in various formats.

Thanks. Yes, my various printers can "fit to page", but TMG still tries to "tile" the output and it doesn't work. I'm aware of the fact that I can adjust the charts manually, but that somehow defeats the object of having an automated process, and needs to be done each time there's a change in the data, or each time I want to produce a different "view" of my data. I've even tried printing the chart to a "big page" PDF, and then importing that into one of my PDF programs. But the PDF that TMG produces doesn't scale at all well (I haven't had time to analyse the code to see why).

I couldn't agree more. But it begs the question of whether or not one should go for consistency at the risk of "interpreting" the original source data, or go for source accuracy at the risk of creating reporting problems. I guess the answer depends on how you use the displayed data>