John Moran

Maybe. It is my understanding that The Master Genealogist makes heavy use of "leading spaces" in the Descendant Indented Chart. Perhaps you could try using U+00A0(0xA0):No-Break Space(s) in your other reports. Good luck, John Editing Note: There was a thread on non-breaking spaces on the TMG-L list a couple of years ago. I believe it concerned HTML web pages. It was both educational and confusing to me because most (USA) users referred to Alt+0160 as the required keystroke, but one user claimed it had to be Alt+416. Drove me nuts trying to figure it out. Turned out the user of Alt+416 as a non-breaking space was using a computer and keyboard set up in English/Hebrew in Israel. (An extra 8 bits worth of characters were added to 160 to make it 416) However, it may be that Win XP will remap Alt+160 as a NBS in languages and keyboard setups used by most TMG users. FWIW. Alt+160

MS Word dominates the Text Editor and Office Suite market. If you currently have a recent version of MS Word and are familiar with *Styles* (see help in MS Word) you may already be using the feature to create and select from different paragraph setups within Word documents. If not, see MS Word Help on the subject of Styles. But if you only have an older version of MS Word, it may be worthwhile to download the free Office Suite software application from the OpenOffice.org web site. (200 mb!!!). OOo Writer, the text editor in this suite handles paragraph styles somewhat differently from MS Word, but the competition has resulted in better paragraph style control in both programs in recent years. The Style feature of either program may help with the margin changes you desire.

Sounds like a good excuse to download the new release of OpenOffice.org writer to read up on "Styles".

Free AVG anti-virus (and probably others) is really getting carried away with e-mail and other script scans these days. (Perhaps it is to let us know how valuable they are before Microsoft cuts them off at the knees with the release of Vista.) Try temporarily disabling the AV software to see if that is the problem.

Can't help with the "keying", but if you meant "source" instead of "spurce" someone will jump in pretty quickly. Good luck, John

It has been my experience that jpg image files wrapped in PDF files typically extract at low "monitor screen" resolution from Adobe 7 Reader. However "low budget" PDF editing utilities, such as PDF995edit may be able to extract the jpgs at full resolution. John

I haven't looked, but is it possible to fully populate an Ancestry Box Chart and then change the font color in certain boxes to white so that names do not print?

In the TMG-L August 2006 archives, there is a short thread on "surprise" or ""hidden" borders in charts sent off for printing by TMG users. In quick experiments I just performed with TMG's Sample Database with PDF995 (but not the Wholly Genes PDF Writer) selected as the printer driver at 36"x108", it is possible to see the cause and effects of this phenomenon - if one does enough mousing around. Files saved and reopened as *.pdf extension from Visual Chartform with Pdf995 driver seem to open as intended, albeit with potentially lower resolution.... Files saved and reopened as *.vcf may give unintended border/margin results if customer and operator of large format printer are not on same wave length. FWIW.

OK. I'll admit I'm winging it here. I seldom actually crank up TMG or any other Genealogy program except to experiment. Having said that, I have at one time or another set my Regional Settings and/or languages to Vietnamese to use it with Family Treemaker, and have also selected Hebrew to see the right to left problems problems in TMG memos. I became interested years ago when some guy wanted to use UFT with Cyrillic. By accident, before I uninstalled the Hebrew support "recently", I found that FTM memo fields seemed to handle the right to left script in Hebrew correctly, although TMG did not - as of a few updates ago. But it looks like the Vietnamese character layout is just a slight modification of the Windows Western layout, so if you have no other persons in the database requiring German or French characters (and perhaps sorting conventions), you might be able to get by with Vietnamese only. That's about all I know about the subject. You get 256 different characters to play with (up to 0xFF in hex) in your TMG database. You can think of each character as being whatever you like, as long as you have a subset of a single byte "font" to print out each of the characters you actually use. As to why you cannot use different languages simultaneously in TMG as you can in M$ Word, I gue$$ it all boil$ down to dollar$ and cent$, and workload, and perceived demographics of the respective customer bases. TMG does not support "unicode" at this time. John

In WinXP, select Start>>Run type in "Charmap" without the quotes Repeat to start two instances of Character Map. Use Mouse in blue at top to separate the two Displays. Set one Charmap to Windows Western. Set the other to Windows Viet Nam. This will let you see what you are up against: Namely two different character sets. Might as well be English vs Cyrillic or Greek. TMG only supports one 8 byte (256 character/font) set at a time. But maybe you can see the location of the characters you need and then fake it in Word by making two different printouts with two different languages selected, and then interleaving the sheets and throwing away the extras.

This is probably unrelated to missing memo problem, but there have been reports in the past of erratic printing of FGS graphics due to printer resolution mismatch. If you are printing direct from TMG, try setting the printer resolution to 600 dpi or less.

I was thinking of the genealogist taking a long walk to a specific location away from the automobile with a portable gps unit capable of maintaining a lat/long vs. time log "in hand." Edited

. Time marches on. If the genealogist in the cemetery remembers to write down the lat/long of each photo s/he takes, yesterday's standalone GPS unit is fine. Otherwise a running breadcrumb trail (waypoint log) referenced to real time can come in mighty handy a week later back home. Taking an occasional closeup picture of the GPS LCD display (if any) and a timepiece is probably a satisfactory method for most of us.

I am going to jump in here on the subject of creating GPS data logs vs. location. At this point in time many, if not most, small point and shoot digital cameras record time of exposure to the second. Assuming that the user has a reasonable clue to the actual time of day and time zone setting, this data can be useful many years later. Taking a picture of a clock or wrist watch (with a scribbled note of the time zone next to the watch) every now and then can go a long way toward establishing meaningful time comparisons at a later date. Software currently exists to compare camera time hacks to GPS tracking logs within a couple of seconds to put time and place together. But when it comes to logging and saving the gps tracks, the state of the art is not so good. This is particularly true for consumer grade handheld units. So anyone considering purchasing a handheld should do their homework first. Sony has just come out with a unit for that purpose, but broke no new ground that anyone on the camera forums seemed to be aware of. Whatever standalone handheld GPS unit is purchased should have the capability of both downloading and uploading from a laptop to be useful. Cell phones will probably lead the way, but it may be a few years before everything comes together. Today's GPS units require much more battery power than either cell phones or digital cameras. Yesterday's hadheld GPS units are obsolete.

Are you using a wired mouse plugged into a port? Do you have a hotel plastic "Do Not Disturb" sign cut to fit over the Thinkpad mouse pad?