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ASCII Descendancy chart: line characters

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I'm an old TMG 4 user and I'm trying to recreate my old reports in TMG8.

 

In the old version, to get the correct line characters in an ASCII Descendancy chart, I had to alter the TMG.INI file to define the line characters I wanted,like this:

LINES="/-\|+|\-/-|"

 

Is there a similar adjustment I can make in TMG8? This illustrates the output I'm getting from TMG8 with both | and \ characters replaced by asterisks.. Because it's not a one-for-one replacement, I can't simply search and replace to fix in a text editor.

 

 

 

Catherine M. FA

+John MCCAFFREY,

*-- Helen J. MCC

*-- John J. MCCA

*-- Catherine (M

+Michael HAN

*-- Edward T

 

The old version would output this.

 

 

Catherine M. (FA

+John MCCAFFREY,

|-- Helen J. MCC

|-- John J. MCCA

\-- Catherine (M

+Michael HAN

\-- Edward T

 

Best

Patty Fagan

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Replying to my own post because I worked out a procedure to get the characters I want in a plaintext descendant file. I'm posting it here in case anyone else has a similar problem.

 

1. Output a descendant chart to Rich Text format.

2. Open the RTF file in Word. Copy the contents to the clipboard.

 

After step 2, everything is done in a text editor with macro capability. I use PC/TextPad for this but others might work as well.

 

3. Open a blank text file and save as PC format with DOS encoding.

4. Paste the contents of the RTF file into the empty DOS text file.

This should preserve all the line drawing characters you saw in Word, but you still need to replace them with characters that will persist when you save to the more generic ANSI encoding.

 

5. Still in DOS mode, write and run a macro to replace the characters you see with |, , --, etc. directly from the keyboard.

6. Save as ANSI encoding. The keyboard characters are old-school, but they hold the proper meaning.

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Hi, Patty -

 

I'm glad you were able to figure it out. The finished report on your web site looks very nice - easy to read and follow. I also especially liked your fan charts; they are beautifully done.

 

Thanks for posting your solution -

 

Virginia

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Virgina, thanks for your kind words.

 

My fan charts were originally Visual Chartform, but I "printed to" .PDF output and and brought the the PDFs into Adobe Illustrator to fix up. Then re-exported to PDF. I think fan charts are an incredibly helpful way for non-technical relatives to understand the big picture.

 

Patty

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Patty -

 

We don't see many examples of VCF fan charts - and yours (link here) show the big picture in a particularly creative and attractive way.

 

I don't know if you have found the VCF forum yet (there is a link on the main forum page), but we're always looking for creative ideas and suggestions if you would like to join in the discussions.

 

Virginia

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