RobinL

This another case where the chart options don't give the output that the user expects. If you request a Data Line in your chart box set up that refers a Marriage Group tag, then VCF will always output the abbreviation or label in that box if a primary Mariage Group tag EXISTS for that person. That is, the existance of the tag (with no date, place, citation, etc) will cause the output. This has been commented upon many times in the past. BobV has said that the existance of tag is information even if if has facts to support it. Ideally, The "remove blank lines" option needs to be expanded to something like an extra check box [x] "Don't show no user data lines". It is this marriage line output issue, that some users never show marriage line in VCF charts. If you make the "Never Married" tag a custom tag in the Other tag Group, and request output in a VCF chart, then the output could be what you expect provided there is no Marriage Group tag for that person. Personally, I would not create this tag in this way. I would create a more useful "Descendant-Note" tag and then output its memo in the chart. The memo could read what you like "never married", "2 sons, 3 daughters", "(married 3 times)", etc

The VCF definition of duplicate persons is confusing to many users - not as a user would expect - made easy for the programmer but not for the user. A person is a duplicate if they are a child of a couple that has been shown already in the progression of creating that chart. In other words, a person who is in a direct descendant line in one part of a chart, but who is then to be shown as the partner of a direct descendant in another part of the chart IS NOT A DUPLICATE. (Hence their children are seen as duplicates.) Personally, I think this is not a good definition and have said so elsewhere. There is another case that also gets missed by this "couple-based" rule. If an external person marries into the family, then later re-marries another descendant this DUPLICATION IS MISSED. Both cases would be detected if the test was applied "Has this ID number been already processed?" and then the result would be as the user expects would result.

John, There is no limit that I have found in saving to .vcf - I have saved files up to 300ft across, but can't print them on a single page! (XP SP3 and W7 SP1 64b) There is a physical limit to the dimensions of a BMP - can't remember what they are are but the result is computed at 96dpi so 50ft is 57600 across, which is likely to be a problem. However, the problem in the .vcf case could be the lack of physical memory or in temp file space. But this doesn't seem likely as you have tried on other computers and OS. Does your chart have any images in it? If it has try creating it without images. One or more images may be corrupt or very large when expanded. Also try creating say a 3 gen, then a 4 gen chart to see whether there is a pattern of when it breaks. Robin

Virginia, Just be aware that the way those colours look on the screen will not necessarily print in the same hues. You need to calibrate your screen and printer to match the same colours. You can't do that with all screen or all printers. La Cie and Mac screens are some that you can calibrate. Nice idea but it may not give the expected result for some users.

I am not aware of this problem. I note that one of you is in Denmark and may be using a non-English setup for Win7 - that might be a clue. Can you replicate this effect when producing a similar chart using the sample project? Does it happen if you limit the number of generations to a small number (say 4)? If 4 works increase that until you find a point of failure. Alternatively, it sounds like one of the system DLL files that is used by VCF in your system is no longer functioning as expected. It may be it has been updated by a Windows update or overwritten with another version when another application has been installed.

For about the last 5 years I have been using a pay-for version of deskPDF from www.docudesk.com. They do have free trial downloads on their site. The main advantage to me was that it will produce single page PDFs up to 650 in in either direction (16.510 m). It has a number of features that I find useful. Also, Some PDF viewers get confused with very large PDF files, (especially page size and it orientation). You may need to experiment with settings to get the full content on a single page view. Always enter dimensions in the portrait mode (width less than height), then select landscape mode if that is what you want. BTW: I have no association with docudesk. Robin

Gary, I believe that then white space problem is in 2 parts: 1) are you running Vista or Win7? IF so you need to manage the desired page size externally to VCF. That is, you need to set the PDF printer the windows default printer AND set the default page size for that device to be the the desired page size for THIS CHART. This setting must be done before you open VCF to print that chart. Usually that means saving the chart as a VC2 file, looling at the Tools > Diagram > Diagram Measurements for the desired single page output, then exiting VCF. Set the PDF printer as the default.Change the Srver Properties of the PDF printer to select the desired page size. Then re-open VCF on the saved PDF file. Now look art File > Print Preview to check that your settings have worked. BEWARE that some PDF printers have limitations in the largest page size that you can print (some are limited to A0, etc). I regularly produce PDFs without gaps that are 20ft (6m) across. 2) Note that in Vista and Win7 VCF: File > Page Setup uses the default page size of the default windows printer to paginate the content to go on the printed pages. Setting a different page size in File > Print _DOES NOT_ effect the pagination of that content that is the printed hence the excess white space. It is just a tedious process to exit VCF make the default page size change and re-open VCF. Please do the process in the desired sequence and report back whether you still get the white space. RobinL

Gary, I find that left-to-right charts become unworkable if they exceed 8ft in height (typically over 400 persons on the chart). Take a look at the technique that I described on page 243 of GTMOOTMG (Edited by Lee Hoffman). This can halve the width of very wide chart without a loss in the comprehension. With several "group" operations you can drag blocks of boxes to reduce the width and increase the height of the chart. You don't have work box by box. The only finesse is in making the extended lines joining the marriage partners that are separated by a move to take the path that you desire. I regularly use this technique to make larger charts much easier to display (and use less paper). The largest chart that I can print is 49ft * 3ft on a single page, but most of the time I try to make several sub-charts each of which is less than 20ft across as long wall spaces clear of doors and windows are uncommon at the venues of most family reunions. Robin

I have not seen that problem either though I don't ever output direct to BMP. I always view the chart in VCF then output as I desire from there. You don't say what operating system you are using, whether it is 32bit or 64bit. The box with a shadow is the standard box with its text and and equal sized filled rectangle placed behind it and displaced to right and down. These two items are internally coupled. Try to new default configuration as suggested by Virginia. Try to select another shadow colour (say red) and see whether this works. In all cases look at the output in VCF. This may be a bug of direct output to BMP. Once you report your results we may be able to identify the cause and hopefully a fix.

There is no current way to increase the number of accent states available in the current VCF (above about 20 becomes confusing to the reader anyway!). Such a request - to increase the number of accent levels to at least match the number of possible possible values of a flag (about 60 states - if you allow for the 26 letters, digits, some punctuation marks, and and accented western European letters) was placed on the wish list some while ago. To my knowledge, this request has not been evaluated.

Terry, I agree with your summary. I don't whether the Wholly Genes chart printing service has run into this problem or not or whether they constrain users to "standard" fonts. This problem particularly comes from using narrow fonts, but I can see it also occurring when a wide font is substituted by a "standard" less wide font - the boxes may get reduced in height and cause tilted UK style marriage lines to be drawn. The PDF file pathway is OK if the chart is small enough to get a good PDF out. But PDF is much more limited in page size than what can be produced by VCF. Hence some charts cannot be sent as PDF files (with fonts embedded). I put this item up as a warning to users. There are built-in no protections against this happening silently. I have submitted a wish list item asking that "VCF checks that the requested fonts exist on the the machine which trying to open the .VC2 file" and "informs the user of the mismatch".

Just to put this into perspective - I have just done a job that started out as a request for an everyone chart for a project with 1800 persons. The main descendancy tree is created as a 20m (68ft) wide chart 450mm (18in) high. It turned out that this was about 1300 persons. Careful work showed that there were 6 other smaller descendancy trees that could be linked to this to give a coverage of about 1750 persons. By looking at the structure of these trees I identified cut points, dividing the final output into 4 printed sheets each about 3.6m (12ft) across by 600mm (2ft) high. Sheet 1 was the upper 8 generations of the descendant of the main surname, Sheet 2 has 5 separate charts on it, one for each of the 5 smaller branches (generations 9+), sheet 3 is a 6th branch (generation 9+) that entirely fills the 3.6m (12ft) * 600mm (2ft) sheet. The last (4th) sheet is second largest descendancy chart to which 4 other minor descendancy charts were separately produced and pasted and linked into it. Each of these charts can be easily displayed at a family reunion or unrolled on the living room floor or dining table to be viewed. So the issue here is that - your initial wish does not match the technical capabilities of most printers and - the result would be impossible to display or view sensibly. - the result will have many confusing long parallel lines that stretch very long distances. A rule of thumb to be considered is the following: a chart will have a single generation that has the most persons in it. Its is this generation (usually the second to last) that governs the extreme dimension of the chart. I find that in most examples this generation contains 35-40% of all the persons within the chart. For your 1200 person example - about 480 persons. Unless you make the font size unreasonably small then the chart box width + the gap to the next box is likely to be at least 40mm (1.5in). This gives an initial chart size estimate of 480 * 40mm (1.5in) = 19.2m (60ft) . Does all this make sense to you? Is this really what you want to see? Is it really of any value to you? I find it far better for audience comprehension if there are separate traditional compact chart representations of almost self contained parts of the total tree. These parts are then properly cross-linked together to other parts by annotations on the chart sheets. The only time where this becomes more difficult to represent is when there are numerous cases of inter-cousin marriages, or cases where siblings in one family marry siblings in another family, or the same partner is divorced from one family to remarry into another branch. BTW: the largest job that I have had to consider for charting gave an initial estimate of chart width of 91m (302ft) !! It did not proceed in this form.

Thanks Jim - yes I did know that but just lost it in a a "senior moment". At least all is now working for Daryl.

Hi Daryl, 1) Take a copy of the **original** SQZ file and keep it somewhere safe. 2) Now a SQZ file is a ZIP file with a different (legacy) extension. 3) Depending on the Zip/Unzip tools you have available, you may have to change the SQZ extension to ZIP before the next step. 4) Now use WinZip or its equivalent to extract all files from the SQZ archive into a **new** empty folder. 5) Using Windows Explorer navigate to this new folder. 6) Sort the files by type to make the next select easier. 7) Select **only** the files with .CDX extension and **delete** them. 8) Now open TMG, File > Project Open and navigate to the new folder and select the PJC file. 9) TMG should now open the project, and in the the process will re-create the just deleted CDX files. 10) Prove that the project is now working as expected. 11) Now File > Backup this project to create a repaired SQZ file. 12) Return to your normal method of restoring, but using this repaired SQZ file. 13) You might like to submit the **original** SQZ file to Wholly Genes Support for them to send it on to the developer Sher. If you do this you should cross-reference to thread on the forum to give him the context.

There is another alternative that I have been experimenting with. In the .NET framework, a non ASCII character can be (UNICODE!) can be represented as the sequence backslash lower case u then 4 hex digits where the 4 hex digits are the the Unicode code point for that glyph. The 4 hex digits can be seen at the bottom left in Windows Character Map (for example the Male symbol is \u2642). This can be entered anywhere in TMG as \\u2642 (note the escaped backslash). On the TMG screen this is shown without glyph conversion as it is entered. This means that you can enter person names etc as correct characters in Name_Vars etc. Memos don't need to be special. Then at least your TMG project will contain the correct data in a standard format. There are Unicode Editors that will input data in this form and show the correct glyphs for you. I have requested that (as an interim) WhollyGenes modifies their Report Writer to make this glyph translation as any printed output is created.

Jeff, You cannot select or replace an image within a person box. BUT you can paste a new image exactly over the out of date image. Use the picture icon on the toolbar to select a replacement image. Because this likely to have many pixels, click near the top left of your chart. It is likely to then display much larger than you need. Select the image, drag the bottom-right handle up to the left while the SHIFT key is pressed. The aspect ratio of the image will be maintained as you reduce it to the required size. Now drag it to superimpose the unwanted image. The ability to select and replace such an image is on the Visual Chartform feature enhancement list. Robin

It is my experience that VCF uses the Page setup page size selection to carve up the chart canvas and then send that to the printer. This can be checked by viewing the result in the File > Print Preview. If you don't see all the chart at Print Preview on a single sheet then that is the way it will print. Your experience is because the correct page size needs to be specified at the opening of the File > Page Setup in VCF. Unfortunately (in Microsoft's wisdom) they have removed the [Printer] selection button in the default Windows 7 version of the Printer Properties dialog. This is a reported serious shortcoming of the way VCF is programmed. To get it work for you, you need to make the PPF995 writer the Windows Default Printer before opening VCF. Now you will find that File > Page Setup will show you the available page sizes for that printer (including the PostScript Custom Page Size) which you can set appropriately. This page size setting should flow on to the File > Print command and the output should be printed at the specified size. [Terry - I don't understand why you are getting what you seem to be.]

I would not do this this way! There is a limit on the size of a JPG file - also VCF outputs JPG at 96dpi meaning that small text will get furry and other items might get staircase edges. Output it from VCF via a PDFwriter (like PDF995) using the "Custom PostScript Page Size" option set appropriately, then send the PDF file to your friend. You can often set the PDF resolution to be 600dpi to get a much better outcome. Remember that some large format printers can't print to the edge of a sheet so make sure that you have no content closer than about 0.75" from the final page size to be sure!

I have tried many permutations Like seach for "VCF" and user "RobinL" in the last 180 days and newer in the the Visual Chartform forum and many other cases to always get no results. Clearly something is wrong with the board's search function.

Mike, Here is the set of forms that I get when using DeskPDF (a paid-for PDF Writer) It allows me to set any size up to 650 * 650 in. I regularly send proof copy PDFs of charts that are 12-30ft by 2ft - 3ft to my clients for checking. Some PDF writers get confused about page orientation in the custom page size mode. I have never seen cut marks on my PDFs. Clearly this is limitation of Cute PDF. BTW: 108 in is a boundary in some early version of PDF implementations. Robin

In my reading of documentation and web sites about MS Office 2007 and the treatment of fonts within this package, it seems that there are a number of switches that can be used to access the same font and get different outcomes in the display of a font. From Rosanna's last post, it seems likely that the two saving actions use different switch settings depending on the context. Hence the broken lines in some cases and not in others. These switch settings are likely to be out of the user's control. You can also see this behaviour being explored in some web blogs when describing font management in the .NET environment - single characters from one font get "on-the-fly" substituted for "Microsoft's best match" character from another font. I have noticed this impact before and after installing a "Unicode BMP Fallback SIL" font. This font provides a display character for every Unicode code point (in Code Page 0) in the form of a square outline and the 4 hex digits of that code point (with small digits 1,2 on the top corners and the small digits 3,4 in the bottom corners) - very distinctive. Now when I visit some web sites which use special characters that are not in standard fonts, I find that this "Unicode BMP Fallback SIL" font is used as a substitute. Before installing this font, the system made a different substitution and therefore rendered the web page differently. Of course this would be solved if the work processor output could store the appropriate Unicode characters for these line symbols (here's hoping in TMG v8?). You can see them in Character Map for Courier New at U+2500, U+2502, U+2514 and U+2518.

Virginia, This doesn't sound like a font install problem, but a change to the font-substitution rules inside Word. I know that MS was getting more picky about symbol fonts and making font substitutions, and in the case of box drawing symbols moving to the improved Courier New font where the box symbols are embedded at their proper Unicode code points. I don't think that Alinetmg.ttf or Wholly.ttf are properly designated as symbol fonts for use with later operating systems and hence the substitution occurs. It is likely that some MS update is now enforcing their rules more strongly hence the problem. Robin

This sounds like a data problem, or a GenBridge problem. It hard to tell without some more information. What kind of chart are you trying create? Does it happen with other styles of chart? Is it project-specific? Does it also happen if you create a chart from the Sample project?

Terry and Janice, Something is different between these cases. Which version of Win 7 are you both running? Home Premium, Professional or Ultimate - Both of you have tried PDF995 (for example) with differing results. I too, have previously experienced problems, because VCF has carved up the chart according to the page size of the default printer. But on File > Print when a larger page size is selected, VCF still puts out the smaller page content in the top left of many large pages. I have seen this problem before when printing to a physical printer. It has considerable consequences if you try the Tool > Diagram > Repaginate as you can't select larger pages in which VCF will split the chart. It may be problem with particular printer drivers but I don't think so as users with the same PDF writer experience different outcomes. It is definitely Vista and Windows 7 related (where the printer driver data model changed from XP). May be it is a subtle difference in the versions of the same PDF writer? The values from File > Page Setup are used by File > Print Preview so it is difficult to judge about your paper use until you try to print a large chart only to find a problem and waste expensive paper. BTW If you google the problem you will see that many graphics (CAD, etc) packages have also run into this problem. Microsoft developers rarely use larger page sizes, so that don't understand applications that do. It really peeves me that Microsoft has such an American bias that made the maximum canvas size in MS Office 22" * 22" thus precluding the printing of the metric equivalent of the ANSI B page. Instead of 22" * 22" they just needed to increase it to 594mm * 594mm (23.4" * 23.4").

I have not yet got TMG v7 working on new Win7 box. However, my reading of the Microsoft pages on the web say that they redesigned the Printer Page Properties Dialog. It can only change the properties of the Windows default printer (that is, they removed the "select Printer" ability). VCF relies on this setting to get the page size to re-paginate the chart. There are programmable fixes for this Microsoft provoked problem described on the web, but VCF has not been updated to make its features compatible with Win 7. I do hope that Wholly Genes recognises that this is another area where TMG is not W7 compliant/capable. The work around. Make your PDF writer your windows default printer. That is, if you need to adjust the page size, - save the generated chart as .VC2 file and then close VCF. - use Printer and Faxes, select your PDF writer "Make default printer". - Reopen VCF, open your svaed VC2 file, - File >Page Setup in VCF should allow you see the pages sizes available in that printing device. - NOTE: you will need to revert back to your previous default printer once you have done the output.