Family Historian User Group

The FH option to generate an offline DVD or website is great for browsing my tree to check for gaps or inconsistencies in the data or supporting sources. I store the files on my NAS, so can access them from anywhere at home. It would be even better if I could also use my iPad, but it doesn’t do a very good job of displaying locally hosted websites. At worst, pages don’t load at all, and even if they do, images are missing and links disabled. It’s an iPad problem rather than a FH issue, as the iPad generally has poor interoperability with other non-Apple systems, but does anybody have a workaround? Maybe a third party app that provides this function?

Outputting as a pdf book is not attractive, as dumb reports that are not linked to each other is a poor substitute. I’ve tried loading the GEDCOM file into GedView, but it has major shortcoming in how it handles FH data. I could also upload the files to my personal webspace and view them online, but I’d rather keep it fully private and off the web.

For a different option.

Have you tried GedExplorer? I use the Android version and simply copy my whole Family Historian Projects folder over to the drive on my phone. It's £3 but works well for me.

Take a look at the Export Gedcom File Plugin with either https://www.heredis.com/en/ or https://www.rootsmagic.com/ both of which offer good GEDCOM support and run on both Windows and Mac with integrated iOS and Android apps.
See the following for details:
plugins:help:export_gedcom_file:export_gedcom_file|> Export Gedcom File Plugin
plugins:help:export_gedcom_file:her_heredis_by_bsd_concept|> Export Gedcom File ~ (HER) Heredis by BSD Concept
plugins:help:export_gedcom_file:rmt_roots_magic_tree|> Export Gedcom File ~ (RMT) Roots Magic Tree

An interesting, very private, online tree service is https://www.zoompast.com/ also supported by the Export Gedcom File Plugin but does not auto-upload Media in bulk.
See plugins:help:export_gedcom_file:zpg_zoompast_genealogy|> Export Gedcom File ~ (ZPG) ZoomPast Genealogy

Good suggestions, thanks, but I was hoping to find a way of displaying the HTML files produced from FH directly on my iPad, rather than copy the data to yet another application with all its potential for omission and corruption.

GedView does have problems that for me make it unacceptable as a primary research tool, but it's fine for carrying a portable copy of your data around with you as long as you are aware of its limitations. It also imports the FH Gedcom file directly off my NAS, so is very convenient to update.

My protocol at the moment is

• Master copy of data in FH - this is the only version that gets updated, everything else is read-only.

• My python script outputs a simplified summary to a GEDCOM file directly from a desktop shortcut, and this is used to update a simplified copy in RootsMagic.

• This RootsMagic copy is synced with Ancestry to give me public visibility of what I am prepared to share and give me access to their hints system.

• A portable copy of all data (less media) in GedView for use on the road when I don't want to carry the laptop around.

You can view an FH produced CD-DVD file on your iPad.
Just copy the whole FH CD-DVD folder which will include a data folder, autorun, fh icon, load & start files into a file management app such as Documents by Readdle using itunes, dropbox or similar.
Navigate to the start file & it will load.

Excellent, thank you for the steer. It works perfectly. I was also able to create a website and select the index homepage, but that is less convenient as FH seems to insist on dumping all the website files into a single directory rather than having a separate data directory as it does for the DVD option.

Even better, I was able to copy the directories to my iPad directly from my local NAS, without having to go through that software abomination known as iTunes .

Mark, checkout how_to:make_family_tree|> Make a Family Tree CD/DVD or Website.
I think you will find that data subfolder holds exactly the same as the FH Website top folder, including all the individual HTML pages, the index page, and media.
Maybe the start.html file happens to work better than invoking the index.html file directly.
But essentially all it does is call data/index.html.

Indeed, but it is a lot easier finding start.html among a handful of files in the DVD structure compared with navigating to index.html in the web version when there could be thousands of files in the same directory!

I suspect Calico Pie opted for the flat structure to avoid issues around how directories are denoted in different file systems, but that’s only a guess.

On a website, the number of files is not a problem, because the index file is the default starting point for the server.
Human involvement is not a consideration.

It is for me when I’m looking for the launch file in the Documents app, but I search more slowly than a web server...

We are agreeing with each other. I was just explaining why the FH created website has all files in one folder.
For human involvement, the CD/DVD version is much easier to handle.