John Cardinal

Doug, Place Labels are controlled by Place Styles. Ranks, etc., aren't places. I wouldn't store them there.

Ed, I'd be careful here. If Second Site included icons, that means it found the exhibits. It may be that all the exhibit point to a single file, and that file may not be in the location specified by the exhibit but instead in the folder identified as the main Exhibits folder for the project.

The above editing of Andy's post is a reminder that it never pays to respond to the trolls. If you do, the response is subject to discipline but the troll goes on his merry way, singing his one-note song.

Colin, I can't comment on the issue of importing exhibits from FTM. I can say that TMG can attach multiple exhibits to people and various other records including events, sources, citations, and places. Second Site 2 can include all the exhibits, attached to any or all of the record types listed above, in HTML pages. I think you have more control over the output when you attach exhibits to events, but you can certainly attach 1, 2, 5, 10, or 100 exhibits to a person and they will all appear on the page (or linked from the page, if you prefer). On this example page, there are multiple events attached to records associated with the subject. There is a primary person exhibit (embedded on the page, but could be linked), there is a non-primary person exhibit (linked via the camera icon, but could be embedded), and there are various exhibits attached to events that are all linked (but could be embedded). The example includes only two exhibits that are attached to the person record of the subject, but there is no practical limit to the number of exhibits that could be attached to a person. Only one can be primary; the function of the primary designation is to pick an image as the one to use when only one image can be shown. Second Site gives precedence to the primary image (it appears first), but the other person exhibits are eligible for the same treatment on the page (embedded or linked). I am not sure what you are trying to achieve on HTML pages, but you can do a lot with exhibits in Second Site.

That is not accurate. A single picture can be used as the primary image exhibit for multiple people, but to do so you must create multiple exhibits. Images and exhibits are not synonyms and it's wise to recognize the difference. Exhibits are attached to a single TMG record (name, event, person, citation, source, place) and cannot be attached to more than one such record. With events, you can attach multiple people to the event, and thus a single exhibit is effectively shared by multiple people, but it's still a single exhibit attached to a single event that happens to have more than one principal or witness.

Pat, If you have people who never went by their birth and/or legal name, then why not use the name they went by as the primary name and their formal or legal name as an alternate?

There is a single name record for each person attached to an event. By default, the name record is the primary name, but you can change it to some other variation. If the names you want to use are split across two name records, you cannot do what you want using TMG sentence variables. You could edit the sentences and use the literal "Nellie" in her sentence and "Ike" in his, but that's a lot of work and difficult to maintain.

There's no way to make a single exhibit be primary for two (or more) people. If you use a single picture in multiple exhibits, the image will appear multiple times in the exhibit log. One approach to consider is to crop the wedding picture twice, once to select only one person and the second time to select only the other. Attach each of those two cropped pictures as the primary person exhibits. Leave the full-size picture attached to the Marriage event.

Chris, The relational database is not too difficult, but there are some sub-structures for sentences, names and places (in particular) that are quite involved. Writing a parser for sentences is non-trivial, and there are some similar tasks involved for name and place styles. If you are going to include source information, that's another area where you will spend some time developing the code to interpret the source definitions. TMG offers the GenBridge™ software development kit, and I think you can access a TMG database through it. I didn't use it in my tools so I don't know the specifics, but if you decide to proceed with your own code, it's probably worth your while to consider that option. You'll have to contact Bob Velke about that.

Chris, If you are willing to create a "custom format", you can change the grouping and ordering of tags. That part is fairly flexible, at least within the limits of the data that the main SS program makes available to the formatting code. If you are interested, provide a little more detail about that part of what you want, and I'll let you know whether or not what you want is possible in SS. SS does not support custom formats for the Exhibit Gallery, so you can't alter the structure of the Exhibit Gallery. You can affect the stylistic characteristics, but I suspect you know that already. John P.S. I am not trying to talk you out of accessing the database directly. I will say that there's a lot to it for anything but the most trivial access.

If you use Second Site, it supports image captions for person, event, source, citation, and place exhibits.

There are a couple right-braces ("}") in the example above. Are there left-braces in there, too? They would cause a problem: they are the "sensitive text" markers and all text between { and } is suppressed.

Peter, I think that's an interesting proposal. You said, "Same way as in all tags," but all tags do not accept name variations. There are three kinds of tags: - names - events - relationships Of the three, only events support name variations.

Peter, The challenge remains that somehow the TMG user has to tell TMG which specific name tag to use. That means that there's no easy way for TMG to provide what you want without adding a tag, and that's one way to use the NarrativeChildren tag, but you object to an additional tag. How do you want to tell TMG which name to use? You will have to describe how you want this to work. Perhaps you are thinking that TMG should use the name tag with the highest date (or sort date) prior to the birth of the children, but that's problematic for several reasons and I doubt it would be implemented.

Peter, The NarrativeChildren tag is not exclusively for exceptions, and it appears to suit this situation well. If the names you want to use do not fit a standard rule, then you are going to have to tell the program which name to use, and the NarrativeChildren tag lets you do that. Why request a new feature when an existing one does it already?

Also, Second Site has a feature where it will create calendars. Check out this example.

Jim, Second Site supports event exhibits, and so you can add a group photo that way. Add the exhibit to an event that is shared by the appropriate principals and witnesses. If event exhibits are Linked, which is the default, an iconic link to the exhibit will appear after the sentence for the event. If event exhibits are Embedded, the picture will in the person page entry. If an exhibit is not appearing, it may be because the event itself is not selected or the event is suppressed because one or both of the principals is living and Suppress Details for Living People is set.

Jim, In general, those two features seem like they could be useful. I think it's important to separate them (as you did) into (1) designating an alternate version and (2) a per-exhibit include/exclude capability. I am not sure that a simple include/exclude property would help SS users. Here's the problem: the user may want the exhibit included in TMG output but not in a site created by SS. So, what the user might need is two include/exclude properties for each exhibit, one to control TMG reports and one to control SS. As you said, some thought is required. I am going to investigate the filtering option that I mentioned in my reply to Joe above.

Joe, Two points, the second of which may make you happy. First, don't use PDF files as image files. Yes, they can be used that way, but all they do is add clutter to the process of using the information. (Feel free to ignore this advice. I am a PDF-hater, at least when they are used to publish information that is designed to be viewed on the web.) Second, there are a couple ways to skip certain external exhibits when making a site in TMG. The first way is a bit of a hack that involves renaming a folder, and so it's a little inconvenient. The basic idea is to put all the sensitive exhibits in (or under) a specific folder. So, for example, you might put them in this folder tree: c:\exhibits\private\ ... You can use subfolders if you want: c:\exhibits\private\images\ ... c:\exhibits\private\documents\ ... When you make your web site, temporarily rename the "private" folder to something else: c:\exhibits\hide\ SS will not find the exhibits because the exhibit record will have a path like "c:\exhibits\private\certificate.pdf" but no such file will exist at that moment. (It will be hiding in "c:\exhibits\hide\certificate.pdf".) After you make your site, rename the folder to its proper name. The other way to hide exhibits will only work for exhibits that you attach to events. Let's say you have a marriage certificate that you have attached to a Marriage event. Detach it from that event, and attach it to a custom tag called "Marr-Cert-Priv" or something similar. Arrange the sort date of the event so that it follows the Marriage event. When you make the site, do not include the Marr-Cert-Priv events, and the site will not include the events and if the events are suppressed, so are the exhibits attached to them. I don't think this situation is really analogous to the situation that is addressed by Second Site's Alternate Image Folder capability. That facility is not intended to suppress specific exhibits, it's used to provide an alternate version. Whether or not you think the analogy applies, I think what is needed is a way for Second Site to skip certain exhibits when building the site. One way to do that might be to allow the user to designate a filter of some sort. So, for example, I could add a filter where you could say "exclude exhibits where the description contains 'do not publish'".

Joe, I think you mean "Second Site" and not "Second Source". One thing you might consider is not using .DOC or .PDF files. In many cases, you can replace those with web pages and for a web site, that's the optimal solution. I certainly would never convert .DOC and .PDF files to .JPG. Presumably, the files contain text, and converting them to images will interfere with accessing the information. The big question is, why do you want to have two versions of a .DOC or .PDF file? TMG doesn't do anything with those exhibits, i.e., it doesn't add them to reports or other kinds of output. The Alternate Image Folder exists because users may want to use hi-res images for printed reports that they create with TMG, but use low-res images for web pages created by Second Site. As far as I know, there's no analogous situation that applies to the other document types (.DOC, .PDF, etc.)

Vince, You can't refer to a witness via the [W] variable in the sentence of a principal. [W] refers to the current person when that person is the subject of the sentence and is a witness. If you want to refer to the people who are assigned the role "Witness", you can add this: As you discovered, if you enter [W] for a principal sentence, TMG changes it to [P], which is the equivalent of [W] but for a principal.

Teresa, As far as I know, there is no restriction that [:NP:] be the last code in the sentence. Here's what TMG help says: Tip: The [:NP:] code works if entered anywhere in the sentence. To make your sentence structures consistent, you might want to enter the code at the end of the sentence. And while we're at it, here's part of what TMG help says about [+]: Note that the second sentence must _start_ with the [+] code. If the [+] code is found at any other position in the sentence, then it is ignored. The "second sentence" part is a reference to a prior example that is not shown. The [+] code is used as part of an event sequence where the output from the second sentence is appended to the output of the first sentence with no intervening punctuation or spacing.

Vince, As far as I know, you can not make either [:NP:] or [+] conditional. I know it is true in Second Site, and I believe it is true in TMG. During the design of the [+] feature, it was made an explicit requirement that the [+] code must be the first text in the sentence of the event, and if you make it conditional then it can't be the first text because at least the " Regarding the multiple variables in a single conditional term, I think that is OK. I do not know if TMG explicitly supports it, but it works in both TMG and in Second Site. In that case, all the variables must have non-empty values or the term will be ignored. So, given this term: PF will not be empty unless the subject has no first name. M3 could be empty. If you don't put text in M3, then the whole term will be ignored and not produce any output.

I usually specify the surname as "--" (double-exclusion). This suppresses the surname and TMG (and SS) will not substitute the missing surname string. The missing surname string doesn't apply in this case; it's not that the surname is unknown, there wasn't one...

While not part of TMG proper, the next version of Second Site will have DNA-related features that help publish, compare, and analyze DNA test results stored in TMG projects.