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Jim Byram

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Posts posted by Jim Byram


  1. I have run into this limitation in what would seem to be a fairly common situation - multiple marriages.  For example, I have not found it uncommon for an ancestor to have had three wives (the first two having died young), with children from all three marriages.

    The Marriage tag for each unique relationship should (and normally would) be marked primary. The same is true for any shared tag. For example, if you have Residence tags shared by person A and person B, person A and person C, and person A and person D, all can be marked primary.

     

    In a narrative report, I always output all tags. The primary marking is of no consequence. As Paul says, the primary marker is important when you have a report or chart with limited space. If you have a slot for one Birth tag and have three Birth tags, you would want the one that you preferred to be output marked primary.


  2. Looking at Lorna's project. The issue is basically what I suspected. The special names using an inferred surname for nicknames have not been created correctly and were not repaired by name validation in project update. Now trying to determine why. The name data entered by Lorna is intact and there is no data integrity issue... just a display issue. Any given Name-Nick tag can have the display name corrected by opening the tag and forcing a rewrite of the given name.


  3. I am currently trying to Import a Gedcom file into TMG, and it says it has a missing header.

    The GEDCOM was created using the UTF-8 character set (UniCode). It needs to be converted to the ANSI character set before TMG can import it. PAF, for example, creates GEDCOMs in UTF-8 by default. To export from PAF for TMG import, the export settings need to be changed to 'Other GEDCOM 5.5' and to the ANSI character set.

     

    I convert these GEDCOMs by opening them in Word (which will recognize the UTF-8) and then saving the GEDCOM as a text file (using the ANSI character set). You then need to check the filename and make sure that it ends in .GED rather than in .TXT.


  4. Bill,

     

    I am doing the same as you... using a flag to determine which individuals are output by Second Site. However I find no need to use the Focus Group to accomplish this.

     

    I have four List of People reports, three with specific filters.

     

    1) The first clears the flag.

    2) The second filters for four progenitors. And includes the spouses, ancestors and descendents of those four specified by the filter. And the report sets the SS flag for those persons.

    3) The third filters for all those with the flag now set. It includes the spouses for those specified by the filter. (In other words, I'm now adding all spouses of spouses.) And the report sets the SS flag for all those specified by the filter.

    4) The fourth filters for all those with the flag now set. It includes the ancestors for 1 generation. (In other words, it adds the parents for all spouses). And the report sets the SS flag for all those specified by the filter.

     

    Then I have a Book Manager report that runs the above four reports in order.

     

    So I can update my SS flag at any point simply by running a single Book Manager report. You can devise a similar group of reports to deal with setting your SS flag.

     

    (Looking at this, I'll probably add a fifth step.

    5) The fifth filters for all those with the flag now set. It includes the descendants for 1 generation. (In other words, it adds the siblings and step-siblings for all ancestors and descendants). And the report sets the SS flag for all those specified by the filter.

    Have to look at the exact results of that before deciding. Might want this step before step 3.)

     

    Jim


  5. I used a comparable project and got comparable times.

     

    This can't be compared to a flag change operation. What you asked the program to do is an extraordinarily complex and time consuming operation and the times are not surprising. You not only need to calculate ancestors or descendants which should be fairly quick but then you need to determine person-by-person whether or not that individual is already in the focus group and add them if necessary.

     

    Focus groups are more useful with more limited group sizes.


  6. Yes, it appears that some of the source text is being clipped.  It's being imported into the Title field and some of the titles are ending with a comma, which leads me to believe that perhaps the line was being clipped.  This could've happened during the export though, and I can check with the source of the gedcom.

    You're going to need to check the GEDCOM and see if the import reflects the GEDCOM.

     

    Regarding the place parts - the person that created the gedcom told me that she had used this format for places "State, County, City" so that is why they have been imported to the wrong fields.  I was hoping there was some way to swap them around w/o having to rekey the data.  So there's not any type of "reassign" macro that can reassign one field to another?  Am I stuck with typing?

    You could edit the GEDCOM file with MS Word and create a macro to do the switch.

     

    In TMG, your only option is to open the Master Place List and edit the places one-by-one. You can retype or copy/paste... whichever is faster.


  7. I'm importing a gedcom and want to adjust the max gedcom line length.  Right now it's set at 71 characters but the box is grayed out and I can't change it.  What am I doing wrong?

    As far as I know, the setting adjusts automatically for your GEDCOM and is meaningless. The import will deal with any legal GEDCOM line length automatically. The value that you see is based on the initial scan of the GEDCOM being imported and is of informational use only.

     

    Have you seen any evidence of the text being clipped?

     

    A related question - I need to adjust the place name entries.  The city is now in the country field, the country is in the city field, and the county is in the right place.  If I use arrows, all the fields get moved over but I can't move country to the city without moving city over even farther, and vice versa.  Is there any way to swap these fields with a macro or something?

    You are going to need to open the Master Place List and edit those places one by one. One wonders why the place parts are swapped around in the GEDCOM file. There's no evidence that the import is swapping them around?


  8. Please do not respond to this topic.

     

    If you need to discuss one of the issues below, please start a new topic.

     

    Since the release of v6.03.000, several issues have been reported by the user community on this forum and on TMG-L. Some of these issues were covered in TMG v6 forum topics that have been lost. I just wanted to list those issues, that I'm aware of, so that they don't need to be reported again. These have been reported in bug submissions and passed on to the developers.

     

    1) There are several Expanded Picklist items being worked on by the developers. These include a "grayout" or "freezing" or "lockup" issue when using the Expanded Picklist to select individuals.

     

    2) When adding a wife with Add Person and having the Name-Marr tag automatically created following the Add Person process, any citations created for the Name-Marr tag are duplicated.

     

    3) There remains one case of the expanded memo losing any text additions/edits when the expanded memo is saved. This happens when you open a Relationship tag and hit F7 to expand the memo field.

     

    Work-around -- To avoid this text loss, click into the memo field before expanding it with F7 or expand the field by clicking on the [Memo] button.

     

    4) The conditional brackets do not work for the father [FATH] and mother [MOTH] sentence variables. Even with the conditionals, the "unknown person" phrase appears.

     

    5) The scroll bar on the read-only memo field on the Data Set Manager screen doesn't work.

     

    Note -- To edit the Data Set memo, click the [Edit] button.

     

    6) Prompts appear under floating toolbars.


  9. In response to John's comment above... True but you can read and write to the older OpenOffice format.

     

    The current v2 beta (1.9.104) will read TMG-generated Word files. Tested the Journal report with TOC, embedded exhibits, bibliography, index and endnotes. I see a few issues that I'm still trying to figure out (such as formatting of the endnote numbers) but, as a whole, most parts of the document work fine.


  10. The above comment, I believe,  reflect Jim's experience satisfactorily opening  TMG RTF report files in OOo 1.1.4.

    That's the case. I just downloaded the v2 beta to check it out. The above notes were made quite a while ago with an earlier version of OO and I was looking at the document after the first opening in OO.

     

    OOo takes relatively simple and dated TMG report outputs in RTF format and transmogrifies them into exceedingly complex RTF files after just one save operation. Footnote fonts, in particular, may not survive this operation exactly as intended.

    If you're using OO as your word processor, I would save in the OO native format rather than into another RTF.


  11. OpenOffice.org works fine with documents output from TMG5/6 but there are a few tricks involved.

     

    1) OO cannot deal with the Word document output by the TMG5/6 report writer. So the first requirement is that documents intended to be opened by OO should be output as Rich text Format (RTF).

     

    2) Note that for the document to be opened from TMG after the report is output, OO must be the Windows default application for RTF files. In other words, the Windows file association for RTF files must be OO.

     

    3) How to update the links for images in OO.

     

    Example...

    Journal report

    Report Options / Exhibits / Embedded

    Output to Rich Text File (RTF)

     

    After clicking Print&Save, we have the report and image files in one folder.

     

    Open the RTF document with OO.

    Edit / Links

    Select all image files

    Click [Modify]

    The Select Directory dialog should be pointing to the correct folder. (If

    not, you'll need to browse to the folder containing the document and image

    files.)

    Click [OK]

    Click [Close]

     

    The images should now show in the document. If the images have not been

    presized to a standardized size for the report, they will require resizing

    in the document just as you would need to do in Word or WordPerfect.


  12. Since the forums use cookies and cookies are machine-specific, how much trouble will we cause ourselves accessing the forums by two or more computers?

    Other than needing to log in, none that I can think of. It's equivalent to erasing the cookies on one machine. There is also a spelling checker cookie for words that you add.


  13. Am I right in surmising that I can't just have forum messages arrive as e-mails?

    The forum can't be used as a mail list.

     

    The point of getting an email from a topic that you create or another is to have notification of additions to the conversation.

     

    You can also enable a 'subscription' that gives you an email notification of any new topic posted to forums of your choice.

     

    Read the Help topic: Email Notification of new messages


  14. I am positive I saw different behavior. My usual mode of operating has been to click the View New Posts link immediately after clicking Mark All Posts as Read. The View New Posts results would be empty, not the same results as before.

    I've always had the residue. I never log off but do close the browser between visits. It's now been several hours since my last visit and the residue has cleared.

     

    The two-hour delay would be harder to implement than emptying the list immediately, which makes me suspicious of that explanation. Plus, the new posts results do get reset by a logoff/logon.

    I agree that logging off/on clears the residue. That's always been the case. I just had 6 new posts. Clicked mark all forums as read. Clicked view new posts again. The 6 items are still there as residue but now marked as read. (Back after a few more hours and the 6 residual items are gone.)

     

    Maybe I am going crazy.

    Sounds about right to me. :lol:


  15. It has actually worked like this forever. The read topics eventually are removed from the new posts list. There is some sort of time factor (2 hours after being marked as read?). What you follow are the new posts highlighted in orange and ignore those that you have marked as read.

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