4 replies to this topic

[nbs]

I am printing out, on a single sheet of 8.5" X 11" paper, a 4-Generation Pedigree Report, in PDF format, which has 15 different "blood ancestors", and an optional 16th person if you include the base person's spouse.

Now everything goes pretty smoothly with what appears to be the standard six lines of information per person:

LINE ONE: date of birth
LINE TWO: place of birth
LINE THREE: date of marriage
LINE FOUR: place of marriage
LINE FIVE: date of death
LINE SIX: place of death

However, I noticed that some of the people who will be in this report are NOT buried in their place of death [in other words, the place where the death certificate was issued is NOT the same as the place where the remains were ultimately laid to rest], so I would like a seventh piece of information for each person, with the result looking something like the following:

LINE ONE: date of birth
LINE TWO: place of birth
LINE THREE: date of marriage
LINE FOUR: place of marriage
LINE FIVE: date of death
LINE SIX: place of death
LINE SEVEN: place of burial

For instance, suppose a person was born in NYC, NY, USA, then moved up to Boston, MA, lived most of his life in Boston, to finally include a death in Boston, but then after his death, the family had his remains transported back down to NYC, to be buried in the family's cemetery plot in NYC.

If I could add the seventh line, then, with the standard abbreviations ["b." for born, "m." for married, "d." for died, and "bur." for burial], the thing would look something like this:

b. 1 Jan 1800
New York City, NY, USA
m. 1 Jan 1825
Boston, MA, USA
d. 1 Jan 1875
Boston, MA, USA
bur. New York City, NY, USA

Now I tried adding a "Burial" tag to the dataset, but I couldn't seem to get the "Burial" tag to be added to the PDF Pedigree File - all that the report wants to generate are just the standard six lines [two for birth, two for marriage, and two for death] - and I don't see how to force it to add the seventh line.

Is there any way that I can get that seventh line to appear on the PDF Pedigree File from within the report generator?

Or will I have to go into Adobe Acrobat and add each of the seventh lines by hand?

Thanks!

[Michael Hannah]

I have not used the Pedigree chart for a while, but I agree that the burial information is not shown, and can not find an option to include that. You may wish to look at the Compressed Pedigree report set for the appropriate number of generations. That does have an option on the Tags tab to include the Primary Burial tag information along with the Birth, Marriage, and Death. The chart looks a little different, but may suit your purposes, especially with the options to control how much of the place prints.

[Terry Reigel]

There is no option to control which tag types appear on the Pedigree chart. As Michael suggests, you could switch to the Compressed Pedigree, which does offer that choice. You could also use an Ancestor Box chart, which also allows you to choose which Tag Types are to be included. You would probably have to adjust the box setttings to get a format that works for you.

Yet another choice would be to use an Ahnentafel report, and restrict it to just the Tag Types you want to see. If you do that, you can compress the output from the normal narrative sentences to just brief phrases pretty easily by use of an alternate language. If that's of interest, ask and we can explain how to do it.

[nbs]

Well let me tell you about the "work around" I came up with this afternoon.

Note that I have both Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Illustrator on this computer.

First, I changed my default printer to be the "Acrobat PDFWriter".

Then in the TMG Pedigree Report, I chose "Destination: Printer", and "printed" the thing to the Acrobat PDFWriter, which, in turn, gave me a new PDF file on my hard drive.

Then I opened that PDF file with Adobe Illustrator, and I used the Illustrator "Selection" Tool to highlight the sixth line [place of death], and I copied that line ["Boston, MA, USA"], and pasted a copy of the sixth line back into the document, and then moved the copy right up under the sixth line, to serve as the new seventh line, and then I chose Illustrator's "Type" Tool to change the text to read "bur. NYC, NY, USA".

Then I saved the results [in PDF format], and got pretty much what I wanted.

Granted, it took some elbow grease, but it worked.

[The reason I went to the trouble of printing to the PDFWriter was because my version of Illustrator isn't real crazy about TMG's default PDF output - I found that for me, the PDF output I got from printing to the PDFWriter was much easier to to work with, and seemed to have fewer problems with things like character encoding.]

Anyway, I felt that it was worth the extra effort to add the seventh line because it gives you so much more potential information - in the sixth line, you leave a pointer to the location of the death certificate, and with the seventh line, you get the added redundancy of a pointer to the location of the tombstone & the church records.

[Michael Hannah]

Well done! Your work with the chart is similar to the post processing some of us do in a word processor to the standard narrative reports produced. At least TMG outputs something that can be manually modified.