* Software MacKiev FTM: Changes to FTM Gedcom

[Peter Collier]

Sofware MacKiev, the company who now own and develop FTM, have made some changes to the FTM Gedcom output that may (?) affect some of the plugins that have been written to import data from FTM to FH.

A beta tester has published details at http://www.tamurajones.net/Ancestry.com ... ader.xhtml (and there is a more general description of the update at http://www.tamurajones.net/SoftwareMacK ... 2014.xhtml), but in summary the main gedcom changes affect the header data and are reported to be:

- Correctly states that it uses GEDCOM 5.5.1 (not 5.5)
- Defaults to using UTF-8
- The UTF-8 GEDCOM file starts with a Byte Order Mark (BOM)
- The HEAD.SOUR.VERS line value is just the product version number
- HEAD.DEST defaults to the same value as HEAD.SOUR
- The file name is just file name and extension, without a path

The Software MacKiev version of FTM is already available to download for new users, and a patch for existing users should be pushing out soon, so if the MacKiev changes do affect any of the import plugins they made need to be looked at (or at least have it made clear that they are for the Ancestry.com version of FTM 2014, not the Software MacKiev version of FTM 2104).

[tatewise]

Thanks for the 'heads-up' Peter, but I doubt if those changes would affect anything associated with importing the Gedcom, neither the new FH V6.1 capability nor Plugins.