* Importing from Legacy Software

[IvorEvans]

I am about to receive a file exported from Legacy software but the sender is finding that although the general export to a gedcom file works well, many of the specialized notes fields in Legacy into which, for example, information from internet researches has been cut and pasted, do not export well.

Notes that have been added to a general "notes" field do fine but in recent years, the sender hasn't tended to use the general notes field as much. For instance, obituary information has usually been cut and pasted into the Death Notes field in Legacy, which doesn't export to the general gedcom format.

I wondered if Family Historian supports importing specifically from the Legacy format or whether I should download the free version of Legacy from the internet and take it from there.

[Jane]

I am surprised the data is not being exported, I presume you have double checked that the data is not in the gedcom by searching for the text in a text editor, if it's there somewhere it should be possible to recover it.

[tatewise]

Also see the how_to:import_from_legacy|> Import from Legacy advice, that may give you further clues about Legacy GEDCOM structures.

[jimlad68]

Your idea of using the Free version of Legacy to import a Legacy file then do a GEDCOM export sounds good.

On my free copy of Legacy, the GEDCOM output option is 5.5.1, I think FH is 5.5.0, don't know if that makes any difference.

I also did an export of a lot of data I loaded into Legacy and the GEDCOM looked fine re CONT, CONC lines. I keep my formatting very simple. If there is a lot of copy/paste of HTML, strange characters etc, to the standard default output of ANSI, it might "leave a lot out". There is an output option of UTF-8 which might cope better, but can FH import UTF-8?

[tatewise]

GEDCOM V5.5.0 is preferable, but V5.5.1 is largely similar, and any discrepancies should probably be handled by FH, but may become Uncategorised Data Fields (UDF).
See how_to:handling_unrecognised_data_fields|> Handling Unrecognised Data Fields for further advice.

FH handles all manner of CONT and CONC lines, even if they are poorly structured.

I am not quite sure what you mean by 'formatting' as neither ANSI nor UTF-8 support formatting such as Bold, Italics or Underscore, etc.
They are both plain text character encodings, but ANSI only supports 256 character codes, whereas UTF-8 is virtually unlimited.

FH does recognise UTF-8 but will only retain the ANSI subset of characters, and possibly map some other UTF-8 characters to their unaccented equivalent.