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RobinL

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Everything posted by RobinL

  1. Indented Descendency charts

    Hi Bill, Please clarify what kind of output format (txt, pdf, word) you are trying save the ouput in. Also, I presume that you are talking about the line drawing characters to the left of the chart? Or is the query about something else? There is no switch in the Report [Options...] that removes these characters. But there are some other ideas that you might try. It depends on what you want to use the output for. [i have written a program that processes the output of a TMG Descendant Indented Chart to produce statistics about that chart. I use it make judgements about how to cut large descendant trees into a collection of smaller smaller trees that are sensible sized charts for display at family reunions.]
  2. Conversion from FTM 2008

    One thing that annoys me is the way users enter some names into FTM, They don't follow FTM's own guidelines for entering names that do not have a surname. This becomes a problem when later creating a chart in TMG. They enter "Maria" when FTM says enter "Maria\\". On import to TMG, the "Maria" case becomes a person with no given name and "Maria" as their surname. If you follow the correct \\ method, later import of the FTM file into TMG works as expected.
  3. Lori, Are you sure that you have successfully use the ANCESTOR INTEREST flag in a chart accent before? There is a bug (also in v6) where this particular flag (and only this one) does not transfer to VCF. Create a custom flag, set it by 2 runs of a suitably filtered List of People - Seconary Output to match the ANCESTOR INTEREST flag. Then use this custom flag in your chart accenting. I hope that helps, Robin
  4. I just tried making the birth date of John Fugate in the sample project non primary and creating a descendant box chart of John Alexander with lifespan in each box. The lifespan for John Fugate did not get ouput. I will report this as a bug. The only way of making the lifepan appear on a single line is if the box width is wide enough. Divorce is a separate tag and in the current version has to be VCF output on a separate line.
  5. Problems with version 7

    This sounds like an unusual experience. What OS are you using? What kind of window do hasve in focus when this happens? e.g. data entry, master place list , explorer, report generation. Wew need need more info? Do you have any computer programs running? Or anti-virus running or any other applications open?
  6. Disappearing mouse

    This is a variant of a problem that also exists in TMG v7 which I identified and reported. It happens on some dialogs if you exit that dialog with Enter or F9, but works as expected if you click the OK button. To get the mouse cursor back move the mouse so that it would move into another pane on the screen. Hopefully it will get fixed in an upgrade to TMG v7.
  7. Debbie, This looks like a bug (or a design limitation) in the way that the grey shadow has been implemented. It assumes that box outlines are thin! However, there is a work around!! Don't select "grey shadow", but select a Frame. Select the grey filled rectangle, check use it as a shadow and set the offeset to the value that makes best sense 30 or greater(?). You may need to experiment on a small chart to get the best settings.
  8. Chart gaps

    This problem has been reported a number of times before. There are three types of it. (1) early children in a family without descendants being placed as close to the left then followed a long distance away by a person with a large descendant tree. (2) multiple marriages where the first spouse has no children and second spouse has nany descendants, a consequence of same bug as above - the long line between first and second spouse. (3) multiple married persons with UK style marriage lines (or partners unknown) causes large than necessary gaps in the chart as the algorithm tries to make certain internal distances equal but creates large spaces. There must be a published chart drawing algorithm that thas this bug because the same problem occurs in FTM, Roots Magic as well as Visual Chartform. It is a lack of a "review and adjust" step in the drawing algorithm that moves some items to the right to reduce these gaps. I have previously asked for it to be fixed as it makes these charts unacceptable for display.
  9. Mike, The handling of images in VCF has some pluses and minuses. However, there are some things that you may not be aware of: (1) an image is imported and initially displayed based on the number of pixels in each direction (based as far as I can tell at 96ppi at 100% zoom). (2) If you select the corner handle of image and hold SHIFT down, then the image scales with constant aspect ratio as you drag that corner. I can see that drop and drag import of an image to the canvas of a VCF chart would be a useful enhancement. RELATIONSHIP CHART: It has been requested before TMG 6 that a VCF form of the relationship chart would be useful. I think that request got inadvertently discarded in the changeover to the new Wholly Genes forum so this is a good suggestion. [Here is a suggestion that might work to get that result with all the features of VCF. Create a custom flag and set it using 2 runs of a List of People (LOP) report, one run for each person of interest setting the flag for that person's ancestors. Then if you know the common ancestor (may take a run of the Relationship Chart to check this), create a Descendant Box Chart starting at this common ancestor, filtering that chart on the custom flag value that you set in the LOP runs above. Of course, this process can be extended to get other branches to show at the same time, so that you could have a relationship chart between 3 or more persons on different branches. It will also show to some extent where there is multiple relationships (duplicate persons will be marked) and this is feature that you can't get from the current relationship chart.]
  10. I know that this seems confusing. The inbuilt standard flags (LIVING, SEX, etc) have the same name and meaning over all data sets (as you can't edit their definitions). If you create _custom_ flag then it gets the name that you give it _plus_ a #N where N is the data set in which you defined it, hence LINK1#2. This is because you could have defined a flag with the same name in one data set as one with a different meaning in another data set. TMG builds and maintains a "firewall" between data sets. Report configurations that use filters or accents on custom flags are particular to that data set as they contain the flag name including the #N suffix. So that is why you appear to have a number of different flags and why such a report created in one data set will not work as expected with another data set. BTW: the duplication of name with same suffix should not occur and suggests that you have found some sequence that has led to some confusion. If it still persists after an Optimise, VFI sequence then you should report how you got it to Support.
  11. Living Together But Not Married

    However, there is one case where you need a "Marriage Group" tag. If a person has multiple partners, whether they have children by them or not, then for Descendant (and Hourglass) Box Charts there needs to be a Marriage Group with a Sort Date for each partnership to be able to control the ordering of these partners on the Chart. Visual Chartform doesn't, and should not use, the birth dates of children to make an assumption about this ordering.
  12. Gender symbols in TMG reports and charts

    Thank you Virginia for including this item here! However, this seems like a checkbox that should be on all the Report Options screens and in Preferences for the Project Explorer, Picklists and Person Details screen displays? I would encourage you to submit a wishlist item to this effect. It would save users having to do a lot of work when they wanted and then did not want those symbols to show.
  13. It is my understanding that this problem (and its equivalent in the Descendant Indented Chart) are the result of the lack of control over such line wrapping within the 3rd party tool used within TMG to construct text-based reports. I doubt that this can be fixed until these reports are constructed using a completely new report generation module. I have no idea of intention to seek a better report generation tool. This is not the only hassle with this report generating tool. It is very inflexible about the setting of page margins and the use of page sizes that are larger than A4 (e.g. A3) which would be another way of creating less frequently wrapped lines.
  14. Teresa and Joan, Thank you for the encouragement. My take on the use of this suggestion is as follows. If this was a feature that was added to TMG then A. For existing tags, all the existing places would be primary. And the desire is to associate these places where appropriate into groups of equivalents within each group one entry remains primary. I see that this could be done in either or both of two places - the Master Place List itself but that has some data corruption dangers or from within the individual Tag Edit Screen (TES). B. For new Tag Entry, this would the same as the Tag Edit screen above. Master Place List - 3 extra buttons here - something like i. Select a place entry X that is already marked primary and click [bookmark Place] button to save this entry for a subsequent operation. ii. Once there is a boomarked place, then select another place entry Y and click [Equivalent Place] button. This later action records place entry X as the primary place entry of Y (thus removing the primary status of Y being itself). If Y is primary and it has equivalent non-primary place entries associated with it, then all of the equivalent place entries also have their primary entry changed from Y to be X. iii. Select a non-primary Z and click [Make Primary] to revert this entry to be no longer be part of an equivalence group and make it primary in its own right. Tag Entry Screen - one extra button here I can't find a short name for this. But I will use [Associated Place...] button. Clicking the [Associated Place...] button opens a screen that is like a filtered version of the Master Place List - I will call it the Place Association screen. If your focus in the Tag Entry Screen was in a particular field then that the value in that field would be used filter to list presented to you. A check box on the Place Association screen would allow you reduce the number of lines by only showing Primary place entries in this list. Select an entry and click the [Equivalent Place] button. The Place Association screen would close setting the TES current place entry as non-primary and the one selected in the Place Assocition screen as the Primary place of this entry. Obviously, I have not discussed the need for [Cancel] in the Place Association screen and [Make Place Primary] on the TES. With the above tools, it is up to the user to migrate their use of places over time. May be if this was a real feature of TMG (not this hypothetical discussion) one could convince John Cardinal to add a suitable feature to the TMG Utility to do some bulk change - this might be difficult for the user to specify and could be more dangerous than it is worth. I have not thought too much about what extra is needed in reports and filters to take advantage of this concept.
  15. I would like to explain an enhancement suggestion for TMG to improve the handling of places with more than one name. This involves a slight change in the way places are recorded. It mirrors the suggestion above of creating a "pseudo-person" for a place so I have decided to repeat it here for comment. (1) The basic concept is that a place has a "primary place name", just like Person Names. (2) Each event records the place name given in the source, just like a "Name-Var". (3) Each new unique place entry is initially made primary. (see next step) (4) But the user may make it non-primary by assigning it to be the equivalent of a previously entered other primary place name. Consequences of this suggestion: ===================== a. There is still one line in the Master Place List per Place Name entry. b. Some entries in the Master Place List are _primary_ others are _non-primary_, that is there would be an extra column in the Master Place List to show this. c. At the Event tag entry screen, there could be an extra step or button, where the user identified which was to primary place entry equivalent to this place entry. d. In a report or chart, the user could have the choice of either outputting the event place name for that event or the primary place name for that event. e. Filters for the Picklists, Project Explorer and Reports could have extra expressions that allowed for searching for tags that had a common _primary_ place name, even though they actually had different recorded place entries. f. If a user did not want to use this suggested additional feature, TMG would act exactly as it does now. All entries in the Master Place List would be considered primary.
  16. Is there a way to add a "topic #" column to the search results? Is there a way to print out all the result pages of a search that includes a "topic #" column?
  17. Export - JPG

    Hi Peter, It is some time since played with the HTML map file, so my memory may be incorrect. (I post-processed this file to create an index to a printed chart - just like you have for a street directory.) I think that you can get the TMG ID# included if you ask fpr the TMG name output to to include that number, but not the leading zeros. It will be difficult to get VCF to add other custom information placed into the HTML map. However, it is possible to post-process the file if you can define the rules for that augmentation. You may need to create 2 charts (one for the real JPG output) and the other to create the HTML map file with your identifiers for extra content. Of course you need to do this so that the box layout remains identical for both runs - care and experimentation here. The HTML file is just a text file, so a macro any programmable text editor can make those changes (but don't try yo do that in a word-processor). In the UNIX/LINIX world you can use one of Python, Perl, Awk, Sed, etc to do this task. I used a Windows version of Awk to do my changes. Open the HTML file in your browser and take a look at the Source and you will then see how each chart box is treated.
  18. Version 7

    The box height in each generation is set by the maximum of the box with the most lines of output in _that_ generation and the "minimum box height" that you set in the chart options. Therefore set the "minimum box height" to a larger number than it is at the moment. The frame is then extended or reduced from your template to go around the invisible box giving the distortion. It takes a bit of experimenting to get the best result for your own needs.
  19. some_custom_frames.zip Attached is a zip of 6 custom frames as examples: _boxpalecyan(30S).emf -- used as a male shadow _boxpalepink(30S).emf -- used as a female shadow _female_circle(20S).emf -- used a female circle centre top of box _femalebox(30S).emf -- used as female symbol top left _male_triangle(20S).emf -- used as a male triangle centre top of box _malebox(30S).emf -- used as male symbol top left - note that I start these filenames with "_" to separate them from the Wholly Genes supplied ones when they are copied into the "frames" folder. Unzip this archive and place the extracted files in the "frames" folder used by your installation of TMG - it varies depending on whether you are running WinVista or earlier. In XP and earlier, it usually was C:\Program Files\The Master Genealogist\frames Then these new files are available as selections under the Simple "S" frames in the frames selection. To get the result that you best like you may have adjust the frame width value and reduce the spacing between boxes in same generation.
  20. Version 7

    This illustrates another solution (about 10 minutes of my effort) that works well for US marriage style lines.
  21. Version 7

    On chart front, it is possible to use different frames as part of an accenting scheme. So find or create a frame that you can use for each sex. I quickly knocked up some "custom" frames to illustrate this using the same method that I described in GTMOOTMG page 245. This works best with the UK style marriages as this causes all boxes within a genration to be the same height.
  22. There is no way to select/modify the shadow component of a box in a VCF chart once it is generated. This is one of the long time items that is somewhere on the VCF wish list. Even if you could remove the visual shadow, VCF uses a different graphical component for a shadowed and unshadowed box. Hence it has different positions for the connecting lines to these boxes. So it is not as a easty as you might think - removing a shadow might be possible. Adding a shadowed box needs a larger box width and box height thus effecting the layout of the whole chart. the box. Even a method to select and change the colour of the shadow would be useful - especially where the shadow colour is part of an accent scheme that want to adjust.
  23. I am not Terry I have previously suggested that the Data Types tab of the Chart Options could be made much more friendly ... When selecting a data line: (1) That the list of data lines be created as two lists - the first one is just the list of tag labels in the project (or the special items like "insert a blank line"). When you select one from this list, then the second list is populated) (2) The second list is the short list of what can be output for this tag label selected in the first list. When filling a box type with Data Lines: (i) That an extra pair of buttons [Copy] and [Paste] be on the screen below the list of Box types, so that when you select one Box Type and Click [Copy] and the selected set of Data Lines are held on a clipboard, Then select another Box Type and click [Paste] then the desfinition that was copied becomes the basis for the current Box Type (then you may need to adjust it slightly). (ii) That an extra pair of buttons (Move Up) and (Move Down) be on the Selected Tag Types screen, so that it is easier to change the order of data lines in the definition. Select a data line and then you can move it up or down. So how should set up the Duplicate person Box type - it is usual to make its contents the same as the ancestor or descendant box contents with an extra entry "(reference to duplicate person)". NOTE that when cousins marry it is their children that are considered duplicates not the reference to the same person on a the chart (but now as a spouse in one box and as the ancestor or descendant in the other box).
  24. Are you trying to stop the showing of the box or just trying to eliminate the "Unknown Person" in the box? In a descendant box chart there is always a box for the spouse. If you use the UK marriage style eliminate the box border, and enter dummy persons for each unknown spouse with a name that has a dash (-) as the first character of thye givenname and the surname fields then the box not be seen.
  25. Chart scaling

    Gotty, I can confirm what you are seeing - there is a series of bugs in the scaling of the chart that distort the chart if the scaling size reduction is considerable e.g. reducing the chart down to 1/3 of its generated size. This effect can be seem in the sample project using the Ancestor Box Chart of Lula Elizabetth Alexander (with ancestor siblings checked). Then reducing the width from 922mm to 317mm. In the scaled chart (1) The scaled font size is incorrect. (if you look at the proerties of a line of text in a chart after you have scaled it compared with before scaling the chart, then the font size goes UP and not down. In the example quoted above, the original 12pt font for names became 36pt, and the data lines at 8pt became 20pt. - Very strange. (2) The line spacing within a box causes text to overlap over text and the outline of the box. (3) The floating "connection ports" that control the position of the within and between generation lines are not correctly placed. This causes strange kinks in the lines and causes lines to pass over over boxes. I will report this.
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