RobinL

The orientation of the descendant box chart refers to the progression of successive generations, not to the dates within a generation. You want a "top to bottom" chart to get what you are expecting. As far as the birth dates are concerned, my guess is that the 1850, 1855, 1857 and 1860 are all seen as "irregular" dates and are sorted before any regular dates (possibly entered with non-visible characters - try re-entering them in the birth tag Tag Entry screen and make sure that the Sort Date is updated to match a "good" date). The dates 1839, 1844, 1848, 1852 are in chronological order and therefore are seen by TMG as regular. To get personal images to show within a box on a chart, you have to complete 2 steps, first attach the primary image to the _person_ not to an _event_ of that person, and secondly, in chart options > Images tab select the "on Left" case - note to be effective you often need to widen the box width on the chart options > Boxes tab.

Please read the "Data File Storage" topic in the TMG Help. Basically, when TMG was installed to the default settings, it recorded those settings in the Windows Registry as the path(s) for it to use to get and create files. You need to tell it that you have moved those locations! TMG reads the values in the registry to control those file actions. Most probably you will need to read and understand the "Advanced" section and then use the "data_paths.txt" mechanism to relocate where TMG looks for and creates files.

It is possible to install Visual Chart Form on its own, but that process takes some expertise. I do not know the legal licensing implications of the process of re-distributing it. However, I would suggest that you install a PDF pseudo printer application (like PDF995 or its equivalent). In VCF, use File > Page Setup; then File > Print (in both cases selecting this pseudo printer) to create a PDF file that you send to your relatives. PDFs are usually smaller than saved .VC2 files any way. NOTE: there is a Windows limitation (I can't remember whether it is Vista/Win7 or 64bit) where _Microsoft have removed the Printer Selection button_ from the the Page Setup dialogue, meaning that you need to first make the PDF pseudo printer your default printer before you generate or open a saved VC2 file.. The one trick is to find a PDF pseudo printer application that has "Postscript Custom Pagesize" selections with maximum page limits that will allow your chart to be shown on a single page. (Some applications have much smaller maximum page sizes than others.) Then your relatives can using Acrobat Reader (or equivalent) to view, zoom and pan over your chart.

I would agree with both these requests if they are implemented sensibly. I believe that formerprof has missed the import of the time-stamp request. Rick is asking for a separate fields in which TMG records the time stamp of the last edit of each record of the database. This would allow for better comparison of projects (created from the same base) like editing by one researcher or another; or edited on a laptop on a trip and be y another researcher on a desktop at home. To be effective, this would need to be done within TMG. The second request is satisfied to some extent by some of the tools already available. BUT these tools do not understand the way that memos of the files are used or the way one field in one table is linked to another field in other table. For instance, exporting the <ProjectName> _I.DBF file to XML should properly include the data content of the file that *is* the exhibit. Even this is unsatisfactory unless it is performed in a way that provides accurately for the linkage between the 27+ tables that form a TMG project. This export would not have to be provided explicitly inside TMG as it could be done equally well by a third party utility.

The issue within the VCf usage is that independent of whether you can create a marriage between 2 persons, that is only half the story. It is my belief that VCF will show such primary same gender relationships in a descendancy-based chart, but it requires both the primary mother and primary father links to be present for male-male or female-female families with children. That is, one person of a couple must be designated as the primary father and the other as the primary mother of the child for the links to show on the chart. This is one of the consequences of using a methodology to represent something for which it was not designed. Gender/sex of members of a relationship, the family structure and the genetic relationships get confused. No charting software that I know adequately and distinctly deals with this same-gender problem or the problem of showing both birth and adoptive parents on the same chart. The reality is that such family structure are becoming more common. An agreed method of handling more than one parent of a given gender needs to be agreed on before most software can chart this. Of course, the question of multiple primary parents of the same gender has implications on all sorts of internals within the software so the issue is not easy to fix.

On 25 May 2007, I reported a bug that the split Memo output for fields other than M1 within VCF requires that M1 has some non blank content for this to work. (28494) Unfortunately, it now over 2 years since there have been any bug fixes to VCF. Let us hope that this area has some attention as TMG 8 is being prepared.

Just an independent comment about Vista 64. My son's I7/6GbRAM machine (no TMG) has had this kind of timing problem since some Microsoft Windows updates over the last 2 months. Unfortunately, we can't detect the particular update as the problem seems to have got progressively worse over time, suggesting that some change is making some action to take longer and longer to perform until the concurrent combination of actions means that a vital event response is lost. Hence the error. The MS message blames the video drivers, but that does not fit well with other web sources (particularly gaming sites and other manufacturer's sites that have seen an increase in this problem). Some "fix" has broken V64. Unfortunately MS has been too hasty to release some changes that have been shown to break even MS's own software (eg the Help system). The occurrence of the problem doesn't seem to be application related. The machine even does it when only screen-based application is FreeCell! My computer supplier/repairer has said that he has seen this on other V64 machines. Later this month we are going to rebuilt my son's machine with W7 as the best way to start again hopefully without the same consequences.

Daryl, Use the ability to create a chart filtered on a value of a custom flag. It is best to create a flag Y/N for each chart that you want. You can collect these persons from a focus group and then use the secondary output of the List of People to do this. I advise using a separate flag for each chart. That way you can have the linking persons between charts showing on both the upper and loer charts. It can be done with a single multi-value custom flag but you need to change the flag values for the persons that link the charts together between chart construction runs. Beware of charts that use UK style marriage links and have some cases where there is an unknown parent (un-entered) as under this filtering option these can create larger than desirable gaps in the chart. Robin

This is a known "issue" of at least 2 years standing. It is a consequence of 2 factors. The choice of line thickness representation within TMG (points) at 72 per inch and the native screen drawing resolution of VCF (pixels) 96 per inch and the rounding down during the conversion or the saving of the file. You can see this effect when you copy a section of a chart onto the clipboard and then paste it back onto the same chart. The pasted copy will have thinner lines. So there 2 work arounds. Don't use some line thicknesses (I think 2 is especially bad), and secondly, always use the Diagram Measurements to force a redraw of the screen to the rounded down thicknesses before you edit anything.

This can depend on the style of chart involved. When using the UK style of marriage lines, all boxes in a generation are set at a height that will accommodate the box with the most contents in that generation. In US style marriages this does not happen unless you have set the minimum box height to some value that impacts the change. Otherwise, the "Delete last Line" on the right click menu should cause the box to reduce in size once that box has lost focus and redrawn.

Just be aware that this works for zero width margins. The canvas size has the margins added to create the attempted final page size. However, because some printers themselves have a non printable marginal region, a chart that has content close to the edges of the canvas can finally be spanned over to an adjacent printed page. A little experiment will resolve what the real situation is for your printer.

Dave, In Chart Options, on the Data Types tab, the default contents for the various box types employs 2 data lines per Birth Death or Marriage. For each Box Type you need to delete these and re-select the compound data line for each event. That is, replace Birth* Group Abbr Date Birth* Group PlacePrep Place by the single entry Birth* Group Abbr Date PlacePrep Place You will need to do a similar action on all Marriage and Death data lines. BTW: In such cases I usually set Place Preposition to (blank) on the same tab.

Try an Optimise, VFI, Optimise sequence of File > Maintenance and try again. This sounds like an index corruption.

This sounds like an indexing problem. My first suggestion is to find a place in the tree where you "know" that there should be more ancestors. Set the focus to a person at that point and set the generations to 2 and create that chart. The reason for this test is that it is easy to repeat. Do the parents of that person show? In the Details View, when you look at that person and their parents are the mother and father fields are filled in in the child view and the child appear as primary in each of the parents view. If this is the case then you need to run the File > Maintenance procedures and try the chart again. I would suggest running Optimise, VFI, Optimise (Optimise will also do a Reindex as part of its process). Then try the small chart again. Once the test case works, try your full chart again.

Just to clarify a point - I have never tested the Page Setup dialog on Vista as I do not run Vista on any machine as my wide format printer. HP does not provide a Vista driver for my elderly printer! There is a second confusion. There must be more than one way that the printer page setup dialog has been coded and run on Vista. Some applications seem to have avoided this problem. May be it is in the way they are installed. Another anecdote - a TMG v7 user trialling Win7 RC1 says that the [Printer] button appears in the VCF Page Setup. May be Microsoft has reverted this change in Win7? We will have to wait and see.

I have just Googled Page Setup Printer Button Vista to find that VCF is not the only program that has this problem. The discussion is too technical to quote here. In Vista using their misguided wisdom, Microsoft have changed the rules. They have made the required flag to access the Printer button OBSOLETE. It is obvious that the reasoning for this change did not take into account the use of programs that can produce output on a number of page sizes or those (particularly graphical) which use custom page sizes. It is typical of programmers not understanding how a feature is used to achieve a necessary outcome. I have submitted a report to this effect to Wholly Genes, but it may take a while before there can be a resolution of it.

There are two related issues here. 1) the impact of a choice of a printer 2) the ability to choose an alternative printer. The choice of a printer in File > Page Setup has two consequences - the selected page size here determines the pagination of the chart when it is sent to the printer. - the maximum page size that can be selected is the maximum that that particular printer diver can handle. Your inability to be able to choose an alternative printer is a consequence in a change in behaviour of the Printer Properties dialog in Vista. That is, the request to show the printer selection button is not being honoured. It could be a setting in your registry. Because other users can see this button and some others can not it is very hard to isolate the problem. It is most likely to be a side effect of some "clean up" action by a 3rd party computer optimising tool that has been run on your system. What computer optimisation tools have been run both your computers? This might provide a clue. For new charts, I can provide a work around. In Start > Printers and Faxes, 1) Make your PDF writer your default printer. 2) Right click that printer icon > Printing Preferences ... and select a new appropriate large page size. 3) Accept those changes. Now create your chart and the selected page size will be used. BTW: this technique has to be used with some other Family History Packages because they *always* assume that you are going to print on the default Windows printer. For previously saved VC2 files, this more difficult. I will try to think about whether there is a work around.

Just to clarify some points, you need to answer a few questions about the computing environment that you are now using: 1) Which Operation System (if Vista 32 or 64 bit)? 2) Which version of TMG? 3) Are you trying output to a PDF writer (if so, which package and version)? in case you have struck a newly discovered issue. I presume that you saved these files in another machine or before there had been a software upgrade? Can you explain what might have changed between the saving and the attempt to print the saved file? Just to clarify a point - the VC2 file saves information about the currently set up printer properties within the VC2 file. This is important in the world where charts are printed on large format printers on custom page sizes. The user wants the page size to be remembered so that the same size remains set on each opening of the file. Some users of Vista who also have tried to save a chart as PDF file have found that some PDF writers are not properly Vista compliant - in as much that the File > Page Setup dialog does not show the [select printer] button. This is not (as far as I know) a VCF bug but a problem in the way some Printer Drivers are operating under Vista. It is essential that you change the printer settings in File > Page Setup before you attempt to print a chart if you are trying to print a chart that was saved with a different printer or page size.

Stuart, A pair of quick comments - 1) There have been several previous wishlist requests for an "all relatives" chart. 2) I would suggest that in the past you have never created a complete version of such a chart within TMG by a simple procedure. It can be done on a case-by-case basis with a lot of work. I think that if you search the Rootsweb TMG-L archives that you will find suggestions of exporting your TMG data to another package that has such a charting feature. There are at least 3 packages that can produce a variant of this style of chart - each has a different way of approaching the layout so you need to look at examples to make sure that the package will produce the chart that you expect. Robin

It was my understanding that the Statistical Report only used primary events to calculate the statistics. If you say that you have a Baptism that is still not dated correctly with respect to the age of the Mother, then this suggests that either the particular baptism is not marked primary or that the indexing in your project is out of date. In File > Maintenance run a sequence Optimise, VFI until no errors corrected. Then try the Statistical report. BTW: I cannot see an easy way to filter the List of Events report for Baptism tags, show their dates and also show the birth date of the Mother. Also there is no current way in a TMG filter to test the difference between to enetered date fields. You could use a filtered list of Events report on the ancestors of your huband (sorted on ID#), listing just the baptism tag data exported Excel. A second list of people report selecting the same ancestors of your husband (sorted on ID#) listing primary birth dates exported to Excel. Then you could paste these side by side, then use Excel to subtract the Mother's birth date from the Child's birth date. Because Excel doesn't think of dates earlier than somewhere about 1900 very well, I would advise only outputting a Year column for this investigation. Robin

Michele, The quickest way to find such an aberrant entry is the run Reports > Statistical Report on the whole project and then look at the person whose ID is listed at Females: Age at first child, ID MIN Robin

This is a known and reported bug. Until it is fixed you will need to draw it using the orthogonal line from the tool bar.

I would advise using a split memo on appropriate custom tag(s) with suitable senences. You can still filter on and report on individual memo parts, so that you can find all persons of a rank or from a regiment, etc. This does not confuse places with non-place hierarchies. If you were using v7 then you could use the reminder feature to assist in more consistent data entry. Take a look at the sentence section on this forum to get some ideas.

There are several points where I differ slightly in view from Mike Talbot. Although the screen display is at 96dpi (pixels per inch), it is my belief that when the images are sent to the printer driver they are handled differently, implying that a little more resolution does enhance the quality. I generally recommend that person images be a maximum of 300 * 450 pixels (for a printed image of about 1 * 1.5 inches). But there is a complication. Each printer driver will resample the image to make the pixels line up with its printing resolution, HP and some other use modulo 150 dpi (150, 300, 600, etc), while Epson use modulo 180 (180, 360, 720, etc). So for the best output choose a print image size, image internal dpi, and total pixels to reduce the losses. I have seen instances where if there are too many images of too high a resolution, then some printer drivers cannot cope meaning that printed charts have some images missing. A second point about editing charts that have images within them. The saving of prior edits (so that you can UNDO some operations) consumes a lot of memory. When you save a VC2 file, close that chart, then reopen it from the saved VC2 file, this causes the UNDO stack to be reset. Periodic saving, then opening means that there is less chance of running out of memory. I hope that this helps, Robin My typical image is about 124 x 180 pixles or so, at around 100 dpi. Some are bigger a few smaller. I usually crop just the face from a photograph or portrait as a TMG/VCF external image and save the original picture elsewhere, like a DVD or flash drive. I never use TMG internal images for ease of backup reasons. My computer memory size is 2.5 gigs and I've never had a memory problem with VCF, even on very large charts. I do a lot of copying and pasting from other charts. VCF displays all images at 96 dpi, so any finer resolution is wasted. Wow! 1200 x 1800 x 300 dpi is huge!!! Remember there is another size multiplyer of 16 to 24 color bits. I don't know the optimum, but you should reduce your images by around an order of magnitude in each direction. Good luck, Mike Talbot

I was really replying to Michael about creating new elastic connection ports that moved with the original box. I will try to explain it more when I have time. However, the point is that almost any thing is possible at the editing phase of VCF. For example, if you add 3 lines to the descendant's box (right click > add a line 3 times), then hightlight the Name of the spouse, then select the 5th line (first new line)of the the descendant box and paste it there. Then repeat for the birth line of the spouse to the 6th line, death line of the spouse to the 7th line, then you can delete the spouse box as the descendant's box now has all thinfo.. You may want to select the Spouse Name (line 5) and change its font, etc to make it show up. This chart style works well for persons with only one partner, but can get confusing for multiply partnered persons.