John Cardinal

Shaun, Man! Users who are very happy with the old version are so frustrating! Seriously, thanks for providing your email address. I will send you the URL you need in a reply to that message. If you are currently using v1.9.9, and you are using a custom Theme or Format, make sure you review the Change Log entries for v1.9.13. There are a lot of compelling features in SS2. It does take a little effort to upgrade if you want your site to look the same as it does in SS1. Personally, I don't think that's the right goal. The changes in SS2 make it easy to build sites that are more up-to-date with respect to current site design standards and conventions compared to SS1. SS1 was first released in 2002 and a lot has changed since then. While I updated the program regularly between 2002 and 2007, I needed to replace it with a new version to (A) apply what I learned from watching people use SS1 to build sites, ( take advantage of new web technologies and better standards adoption by browser suppliers. If you need/want advice about how to upgrade, let me know. There is some helpful information in the newsletter that announced the release of SS2, including a FAQ section for SS1 users. Also, check out the SS2 example site.

If you contact me off-forum I will tell you how to upgrade to SS v1.9.16. Is there any particular reason you do not want to upgrade to SS2? SS2 is compatible with TMG v6 and TMG v7.

See "All Environments", point #2, on this page: http://www.johncardinal.com/tmgutil/known.htm Before you delete anything, and especially before you use TMG Utility to delete anything, I'd contact support. Several thousand new tags should not appear out of nowhere. You should understand more about the issue before you try fixing it.

Peter, I am not sure I understand completely. You have multiple addresses of the form "HouseN, City, County". You originally assigned them the same LatLong values because you wanted them to appear on an SS map. Unfortunately, using the same LatLong value meant that all the map markers were in the same place, one on top of the other. Next, you changed the LatLong values slightly. This solved the SS Map problem because now the markers are not in the same place, but now there is an issue in TMG: when you search for places, there are many entries in the list. I am not sure where you are "searching for place" (I suspect it is when entering place information while adding or editing an event) and I am not sure why seeing multiple places is a bad thing. The houses were in different places, and so they are not the same place. It sounds like you want the different places to be treated as the same place in some cases and as different places in other cases and I don't know how the software can do that. Do I understand correctly?

I think someone explained that it's the dimensions of the image that cause the problem, not the number of bytes in the file. What are the dimensions of the chart as it stands now? Can you manipulate the chart to make it wider and not as tall? I believe the limitation is the JPG file type. Second Site will create arbitrarily large charts that are pure HTML. I've used it to create charts with thousands of members. The Second Site charts are not as flexible as VCF charts; you can't include pictures and the dates are limited to the lifespan of the person. On the other hand, names in the charts are automatically linked (back and forth) to person page entries that can contain pictures and the full event details for the person so the full detail is available. The Second Site example site has a couple relatively small charts. In those charts, only some of the names are links because most of the people in the TMG database are excluded from the site. Still, they should give you an idea and if you need an example of a large chart, let me know and I will try to find one. (They're everywhere, but still hard to find! )

Zane, You can enter LatLong coordinates in TMG's preferred format and SS will handle them just fine. The problem with TMG coordinates is that they are not accurate enough. As Jim described, when you enter "-32.693159,148.189028" in TMG, TMG converts the value to "324135S1481120E". The problem is, those two locations are different. A more accurate conversion to degrees-minutes-seconds would be 32 41 35.4S, 148 11 20.5E. (TMG's internal format does not support fractional seconds in LatLong values.) It's a relatively small difference, but when trying to locate a hard-to-see grave marker, the difference could be crucial. Note that if you convert "324135S1481120E" back to decimal degrees format you get "-32.693066,148.188889" not "-32.693159,148.189028". To allow for more precise locations in Second Site maps, SS also recognizes a special form of the decimal degrees notation that you can use in place of the TMG degrees-minutes-seconds format. When you enter the LatLong as "-32.693159~148.189028", TMG will not convert the value to it's internal format. The advantage is that you can record more precise locations. The disadvantage is that some of TMG's features related to LatLongs will not work properly. I have asked Wholly Genes to increase the precision of the LatLong values in a future release of TMG.

I use a very basic approach for exhibits. All my exhibits are in one folder, D:\Exhibits. I have my project on two different PCs, and the paths are the same on both PCs: D:\TMG Projects D:\Exhibits I never backup my exhibits with TMG. I make backups separately. The exhibits are mostly (if not completely) copies of digital images that I keep in a separate location. So, for example, the same image might be stored as: D:\Exhibits\05138-01.jpg and D:\Images\scanned\001\000329.jpg In the first case, the number is the person's TMG ID# followed by a sequence number (Person 5138, image 01). The second file (the original, actually) is in a folder tree where I keep all my digital images. I use photo album software to keep track of dates, captions, etc.

Radiohead, Are you using internal exhibits or external exhibits?

Jim, I think Rick's point is that when he presses Enter so the filter will be applied, the filter is applied but the [Add] button is executed, too.

The other part of [WO] refers to "other than the current subject". So, for example, if John Doe is a witness, and TMG (or SS) is creating a narrative for John Doe, John Doe is not included in the output of [WO]. When creating a narrative for some other person attached to the event, [WO] would include John Doe. As Terry explained, [WO] is not restricted by roles. Also, note that every person attached to the event has a role. If you don't explicitly assign a role, the role will either be "Principal" or "Witness".

Note the double commas. Change "" to "" and you'll get one comma. Grant THOMPSON Jr (1), son of Grant Paul THOMPSON (2) and Amy PARSON (3), was born ...

Terry et al, The following terms are OK if you want the whole phrase to be ignored if either variable is empty. That looks like the intent to me. In practice, only [R:MD] and [M2] can be empty, so the net effect is to omit the "delivered by" fragment if there is no doctor and omit the "birth certificate" fragment if there is no M2. I am not sure if the rules for handling multiple variables in a conditional term are documented, but I am pretty sure that TMG handles it and I am positive that Second Site does. The "" construct may not work as expected. By itself, "" creates ", son of father and mother,", i.e., it already adds a leading and trailing comma. I don't know about TMG, but in SS, specifying your own commas will get you two in each place.

MOTH is not a built-in role. MOTH (and FATH, PAR, etc.) are variables. Roles only apply to principals or witnesses, i.e., people who are explicitly attached to an event.

Joop, It doesn't help to have this post in two forums; it will just divide the responses. I deleted the copy of this post that you added to the UK section because I think this forum is the best location for it.

There is no way for anyone except Wholly Genes to create a version of TMG that is Unicode-compatible. For them to do that, they will have to replace VFP with another database engine. TMG includes dozens of software components for importing data, exporting data, entering data, producing charts, producing reports, etc., most of which are implemented in VFP and cannot be automatically converted to some other system. These facts have been described in other threads, and you have posted comments in those threads, so I assume you have read them. It seems to me that you refuse to accept reality.

What do you expect to do with the SQL files after creating them? TMG won't read them, and so you'll be left with a set of SQL tables that no existing program will process for you.

Peter, When I implemented the Add Married Names feature, I considered using the "after" date modifier and rejected it, mostly because it would not work for marriages that were already assigned an "after" Sort Date. (Michael's list is interesting, but all those date formats exist for a reason and might be used for an existing event.) I decided I wanted all the dates to follow the same rule and so I implemented the "+1 day" logic. If a marriage date/sort date changes, the Name-Marr sort date is going to need attention and in most cases it will be obvious what is needed. If only the modifier changes, the "+1" day rule should yield a reasonable outcome without editing.

You may be interested to know that when TMG Utility creates a married name record, you can configure it to copy the sort date of the marriage tag, but it adds one day to the sort date so that the married name tag always sorts after the marriage tag.

Exhibits are attached to a single item; they are not attached to multiple items. A single image file may be referenced by multiple exhibits, but that's different. As a result, to determine if the same external image file is used for more than one exhibit, you need a report that includes the path to the external images. If you sort the output by the file path you'll see which images are referenced more than once. As Jim described, TMG Utility has some features for dealing with exhibits: Export Images, which includes option to convert from internal to external Export Data, which includes an option to export the Exhibit Log to XML or HTML (example HTML output) Verify Exhibit Paths

Mike, First, I assume that "mgb" is megabytes; that's usually abbreviated "MB". For gigabytes, use "GB". The error message indicates that the "_g.fpt" file is more than 2GB. I believe 2GB is the maximum size of a Visual FoxPro data file and thus for TMG. That is apparently the immediate cause of the issue. It's not clear why the _g.fpt file is 2GB when the GEDCOM file was 90MB. It's possible some records in the GEDCOM file are attached to multiple TMG records and that essentially multiplies the storage used for the records. It's also possible that the GEDCOM file references external files that TMG stores in the _g.fpt file. (The _g.fpt file is where TMG stores the text from event memos, among other things.) You may be able to inspect the GEDCOM file to determine what's amiss. You'll need a good text editor, one capable of opening a 90MB text file. If that doesn't work, then you might try a process of elimination where you configure TMG to ignore some of the GEDCOM tags. If the problem is the NOTE tags (and their associated CONT and CONC tags), that may not be very helpful: the load will work when skipping NOTE tags but you probably can't skip all those. I am a little rusty on GEDCOM, but as I recall, NOTE tags can be used to describe an event, but they are also used to attach text to other record types. You could try importing the GEDCOM file into some other genealogy program to see if any program can handle it. If you succeed, then you could try to load the data into TMG directly from the other program.

Michael, There is no easy way to do that. There are various tricks you could employ, such as using two (or more) languages with different sentences: in the language you choose for HTML output, include the HTML in the sentence or in a memo segment that is not output in the other language. When using Second Site, you can use this structure: [HID:][sS:] html goes here [:SS][:HID] The [sS:] and [:SS] codes undo the effect of TMG's [HID:] and [:HID] codes, so the text between the SS codes is included in the output despite the presence of the HID codes. TMG does not know what [sS:] and [:SS] mean, so it ignores them and the text remains hidden in TMG reports. John

I'd be surprised if you were "promised a cure." The system works as designed; if you want a godparent to be treated as a blood relative, then you use the God- relationship tag. If you do not want to create a blood relationship, then you do not use the God- tag. Instead, you can add witnesses to the Birth or Baptism or some other tag. For an adoptive parent, the same basic rules apply. In that case, however, you would add an Adoption event where the adoptive parents are witnesses.

TMG Utility has two features for dealing with this. Add Standard Names - Adds name tags with the "common" spelling of a surname to people who have it spelled differently. So, for example, you can add a name tag with the surname spelled "Smith" for everyone who currently has it spelled "Smythe". This helps you find people whose primary surname uses a variant spelling. Change Name Parts - A powerful bulk editor for names where you can change name parts (surnames, given names, titles, etc.) based on criteria you define.

TMG does not support Unicode, so it will not accept a wide range of accented characters. It will accept some; you have to know the keycodes and the key combinations to enter them. I am not certain, but I think the character set is ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) or possibly Windows-1252. You can see which characters are in those sets here: Windows-1252 ISO-8859-1 I think you use the Alt key and numbers from the keypad to enter the characters. While holding down Alt, press zero and the the number from beneath the characters in the tables shown on the linked pages. TMG supports images via its "Exhibits" feature. I believe you can import images from Gedcom files, but you probably have to use the Advanced options in the Gedcom import facility to do so. 51 exhibits is not that many. Some TMG users have thousands of exhibits.

Michael, You can try to use your own HTML, but I don't think it will work. Source elements are not supposed to contain HTML, and there are conventions that get in the way. For example, the convention of citing URLs like this: <http://www.example.com> SS has to convert the so they are not interpreted as HTML. I think that processing alone will defeat your attempt to use HTML there, and I don't think using TMG's [html:] and [:HTML] codes will get around it. HTML and the various codes work in the COMMENT element of the source because that field is treated as a memo field, similar to the way event memos are treated.