RobinL

Gotty, I seldom do this as I can choose the appropriate size of paper to correspond to the generated (or reshaped ) chart. However, it is a long time (many versions of VCF) since I last tried. Using TMG v6.12, I could not get the effect you are describing. I tried both a small chart (from the sample project) or a larger complex reshaped chart reducing each to about 40% of normal size. All changes acted as one would expect even if the result was not practical to use because of the small effective font size. I then tried 25% with no obvious corruption. So we need more information. - Which type of chart - descendant, ancestor, or hourglass box or fan chart? - Which orientation of chart (top-to-bottom, etc)? - Does the chart have images in the boxes? If descendant or hourglass, - Are you using US or UK style of Marriage lines?. Ideally, can you take a screen grab of a small portion that you see as corrupted and attach it to your reply? It sounds like there are 2 types of problem: - the text size has not been adjusted correctly - the path of some connection lines is not appropriate. (from edit screen - not print preview - as the print preview will not zoom in far enough to give a good screen grab!) In this example, from the sample project, I do see a scaling issue. Observe that the scaling has meant that the descenders of the previous line's character are overlayed by the top of the next lines characters and that the descenders of the bottom line are truncated by the box boundary. Before I report this, I would like more information about the other effects that you are seeing.

Ok, in principle your reources should be sufficient. However, it may still either be the format of the images or their total expanded size that hits some internal limit. I have found that down-sampling of primary "passport" images for charts can reduce the images to about 300 *450 without noticable loss in print quality at the normal chart printing size. But then you can't have another primary image for a full page of the same person in a book without a lot of fiddling or custom tags.

I have had this experience also, a long while ago. I never worked out the actual reason. The impotant factors at the time seemed to be that it was a W98 computer, there many images to be output in the chart, the images had not been down-sampled before they were attached in TMG. I think that this an effect of having large numbers of pixels per image, many images and little available memory. It could also be a quirk in the way some image format variants are decoded by the display routines in VCF. As a test of the last point, open VCF on a blank canvas and try to add (from toolbar button) an image that does get seen to a chart. If it comes out on its own the file format is OK for VCF. Remember that it is the uncompressed size of an image that gorerns the size of the output .VC2 file or what is finally sent to the printer. Some I have found that an image does not appear on the screen but prints OK and vice versa. I don't think that this a VCF bug, but a limitation associated with the installation / resources of the current computer. Try the operation on another computer and it may well work.

Beware that when you do this there some features involving Name and Place Styles that get disabled. Thereafter you are locked into creating projects (importing, etc) that can only use UK Standard Name and Place Styles. A better thing to do is add the styles, source templates, custom tags, sentences, etc to a US version if you want the flexibility to operate in a global data situation. This approach has only minor downsides. I am sure that someone else can give you suscinct instructions to do this. To cleanup after this change you will probably need to run John Cardinal's TMG Utility to get your previously entered data into a consistent form.

I agree, in the interests in continuance of exisiting features, I would prefer that there was a new Relationship Box Chart style amongst the VCF types of output. This would give access to the full set of Chart Options... of VCF rather than the restricted options now in the current report.

I suggest that you look at some of the "hole" analysis features (the Tag Analysis Report) of TagWiz! at http://beesoft.soho.on.net/BeeSoft/tagwiz/ and then send Bryan Wetton an email to find out the release status. [ I have been involved in discussions with Bryan about such "data hole-finding" features.]

Just another reason for putting the "Partner" tag in the Marriage Group. If a person has more than one partner, or has children with more than one partner, whether there is any marriage or other partnership relationship, you must create a Marriage Group tag with a sort date for each relationship if you want to control the order that those partners and/or their children are displayed in some reports and all Descendancy-related Box Charts.

There is no direct facilty to convert VCH to VC2 files. However, on a computer with both an old version of VCF (v1.x) and a the more recent version of VCF installed, you can (to some degree) convert the files. Open a the VCH chart in a the old version, then Edit > Select All, Edit > Copy (to clipboard). Open the more recent version of VCF on a blank canvas. Click in the top left, then Edit > Paste. (the chart appears) Then File > Save As ... (preferably to a new name in a new location). After this process, you may need to adjust the canvas size.

By default the text box creared by the "A" button on the tool bar has its right-click > Properties > Text tab "Multiple Lines" unchecked. Check this to make multiple lines possible. Once this has been set, entering a CTRL+J in the Text field will give a line break point.

There is a place for another chart style within TMG that could show more than the descendancy or ancestry of a single focus person. The Hourglass is just a simple combination of one of each of these. It is possible with an increasing amount of manual editing to produce more complex connected collections of these basic building blocks, but it is not easy, quick or consistent in format. I don't think that the FTM Everyone chart layout is very satisfactory both in the positioning of persons nor in the control over the scope of who will be shown on the chart. Other FH packages have similar charts all of which leave much to be desired for ease of understanding by the normal chart viewing audience or in their efficient use of the chart page. That means that - a better "acceptable" layout needs to agreed on. (Like minimizing the lengths of some types of connection in preference to lengths of other types of connection, while maintaining generational groupings, use of a number of standardized line styles for connection types, etc) - a well defined easily used method of defining which persons are to be shown needs to be agreed upon. ( Like some connection distance from a fous person, - ancestors to A generations from the focus person, to this then add their descendants for B generations, plus descendants for C generations from the focus person, to this set then add their ancestors for D generations - this would include children of a parent in common (the blended family) and ancestors of spouses. This could also be controlled when (optionally) those persons had a flag value set). I would support the inclusion of an expanded scope style chart layout if these issues could be addressed. I suspect that the average user under-estimates the development cost to produce such a new chart style and the likely priority that it might get when such a charting feature would not get used by a majority of users.

Philipp, This is a known problem that I believe is outside of the control of Whollygenes (except for a cleaner method saying VCF can't export a chart of size larger than XXXX pixels). I am not sure whether it is a Windows issue, a 3rd party tool issue or a JPG format limitation. However, what you need to do is find a better quality PDF writer "pseudo-printer" tool (probably not free) that will create high quality very large custom page size PDF files. I use "deskPDF" because it can do this when you set the "Custom Postscript" page size. Beware that many of these packages don't render the chart correctly; they get the margins wrong, render lines at the wrong thickness and can render some overlapping objects in the wrong order so that they obscure items that should be visible in the final product. Robin

Lori, I think that you are the first person to notice this effect with a Memo. The logic within Visual Chartform as to when to show just the Abbrev is inconsistent. For any tag, the _very_ existence of a tag record independent of what fields are populated will always cause the Abbrev string to show on the chart. You can see this with a Marriage tag (no Date or Place but has a SortDate to force the correct Spouse sequence. In this case the m. is output in these cases. The best solution is to make the Death Memo the last line to be output in any box (set in the Data Types tab of Chart Options). Then after creating the chart you can right click -> Remove Line on each appropriate box. Sorry this is the best that is possible at the moment. May be you need to "make a wish" that a check box is added to the Data Types tab (for field by field use) or near the "Remove Empty Lines' check box to also "Remove Lines with no data".

One subtle side-effect of this chart combining process and a warning. Each box in the combined chart retains its generation identity from the chart in which that box was created. That generation identity is used by the right-click -> Select Generation feature. Which means that for a combined chart, to get a correct set of boxes highlighted the 2 or more charts on the same canvas must have all been commenced at the same generation. This Select Generation operation is quite likely to select boxes that are not all the same combined generation from the separately created charts. Unfortunately, as within VCF the user cannot adjust the generation setting within the boxes, you are advised to make any generation-based property change (using the Select generation feature) within the separate charts before you combine them on to a single canvas.

Another solution for eliminating the names in boxes is to enter a name for that person with no GivenName and to entera double minus "--" as the surname to exclude it its printing. The advantage of this method is that it requires no editing Visual Chartform.

When you say you have updates - the "best" / " easiest" method depends on a number of things. When new persons are added, when birth dates are added that change the order of chilfren in early families, when marriage dates change the order of these on the chart, the only practical way is to start again. Just think of what you are asking VCF to do if it was to update the chart from the previous version - the result would be very difficult to do (and retain the relevant other changes that you have added to the first chart - this map here with lines from some place to certain boxes.) ... I could go on. How much editing was done to the previous chart was generated in VCF? (Was it only last minute corrections in the text or was it a large number of box movements, addition of extra pictures, notes, lines, etc.) If only a small number of edits then start from scratch as adding new persons, changing birth dates, correcting multiple marriage partner sequences can be difficult to resolve - to get the space in the right place on the chart. <G> In any case, I would update my project and then generate the same VCF chart again - at minimum, to see how the sequence of persons has changed. Then I would review my best options - IT AIN'T EASY on bigger charts.

Are trying to do the restore on a Wondows 2000 system? Take a copy of the SQZ and rename the extension to ZIP and then use Winzip or WinRAR or Pkzip to extract the files into a new suitably located folder for the restored project. Then File > Open Project and navigate to that folder and select the project that is found there. (The tool for extracting files in TMG (a 3rd party component) sometimes gives the error that you have experienced.

The short answer is that there is no way to re-incorporate edits on a previous version of the "same" chart unless those edits are capable of being expressed in the TMG project and then output appropriately in a newly generated chart. The saved VC2 file of the old chart contains the graphics of your edits, but does not differentiate between what VCF generated and what you edited. There is no way to separately save just your edits in a separate file that you can import and apply to a new chart. (I doubt that you could make this work sensibly without a complex user interface to allow the user to apply some edits and not others, etc. This is the problem of merging two databases. I doubt that it would be worth Wholly Genes spending the time to develop a feature to serve an infrequent request.)

Karla, Just to put this issue in perspective - it goes back a long way! all the way back to 1998. Here is a transcript of part of a message that I put on the TMG_UK list of the time: Strictly, Microsoft has to shoulder most of the blame for the delay. It has been extremely tardy in implementing Unicode string storage in VFP. If you want to understand take a look at the wish list for VFP10 at http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~VFPVersion10WishList

I have never noticed this effect as I NEVER use the addition of a background image at chart generation time. I always add an image after the chart has been generated. The user has no control over the background image (can't select it) or adjust it in any way. Adding an image after generation (and sending it to the back) is much more preferable - but only add it after you have done all other edits as it can become annoying during editing.

This change was done to overcome another probnlem with the backup path that caused a crash when the Drive letter was not found. Especially when you try to backup a project that has come from another machine that had other drive letters or you were backing up to a network drive that was not accessible. I do not know what options the developers have to resolve the problem except adding yet another popup window to enable the user to select another drive letter. Reversing the "fix" returns the possiblility of the crash.

For several reasons, what you are doing is likely to give you some grief. A database is many files and to open those files the files must be writable. On a CD files are automatically made read-only. The preferred method (with minimum hassles) is to use File > Backup to a folder on your hard drive, then to copy that SQZ file to the CD (some CDwriter software can't handle writing directly to them as a file is being compressed on the fly). Then on your friend's machine (or to test the CD on your own) use File > Restore into a new folder.

I would strongly advise using a single data set to hold all 3 types of persons. Use a flag to provide a method filtering lists, etc. In fact, in my own one-name study, I have joined all my persons together with pseudo-fathers (as fathers of the end-of-line persons) so that I can find all persons that might become a family in the future. I give these pseudo-fathers a birth date and death date and make them the father of all end-of-line persons born within that date range (typically 50 years), so some of these pseudo-persons have up to 300 children! This helps when looking for candidates to research for linkages.

A Memo in TMG can be broken into 9 parts by the successive use of the "||" (no quotes) symbol. A Memo of the form First Part || Second Part || Third Part || etc means that you can select to output in VCF the particular part of the Memo. As far as I know, there is no equivalent checkbox in any VCF output (as there is on the Places tab of of Options for the Individual Narrative report) viz. "Abbreviate states/provinces in the output" Such an option would be useful, but has the weakness that it can not be applied selectively on a country by country basis. It would not work if you use place styles. In UK usage you would want it to apply to the County field not the State field.

Just to put this in perspective, here is a simple example of how the orthogonal line code in VCF does not preserve user edited line positioning. In any project with a family of more than one child, (1) create a two generation descendant chart. (2) about double the chart canvas height. (3) select a child box and drag it down. (4) select the orthogonal line joining that child to their parent. (5) using a handle on a corner of that line drag the line up to be in line with the other children lines. (6) select part of the chart including the parent and the moved child box. (7) Now nudge the grouped chart. The user adjusted line is redrawn crossing over the other boxes. BUT this line is within the grouped object and can't be selected for another adjustment without first ungrouping the previously grouped. It would be the user's expectation that everything contained entirely within the grouped object would remain in the same layout when the grouped object is moved.

I am pleased to see that someone else sees this as an important issue. I have requested this enhancement on a number occasions over the last few years with no effect. (Ever since you could associate a specific name variation with an event tag.) What I asked for was the ability to output the primary name (as you can now) **and** as additional output column selections the Event-Associated Name Variation forms of the names. (That is what we can't do.) This is important when dealing with records from tombstones, shipping lists, censuses, etc where the name in use at that time is recorded.