Family Historian User Group

Now the Gendex index has been relaunched it seemed a good idea to produce a plugin to create the file.

The plugin can be downloaded from
http://www.family-historian.co.uk/plugi ... try?id=317

It will use your created web pages for your Project and build an index file (gendex.txt) in the Website folder which can be loaded to http://gendexnetwork.org

To find out more see: Dick Eastman's post
http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_ge ... index.html

ID:6920

Jane, a while back there was the General thread gendex file.
Under that I posted a WiP Plugin Export Gendex File.

I raised several questions that were not answered, and no one seemed to use the Plugin.

Can we try and merge the two Plugins?

On comparing the two Plugins, I have the following comments.

The Gendex website Help says:

What does a GenDex file look like?
Entries from a GenDex file look like this when viewed in a text editor: -
URL|SURNAME|First Name /Surname/|Birth Date|Place of Birth|Death Date|Place of Death|
I1726&tree=McKane|Mary Robena //|8 Jun 1905||27 Apr 1966||
I903&tree=McKane|ADAIR|Cecil /ADAIR/|10 Jan 1919|York, ON|22 May 1997| Grey, ON|

i.e.
(1) The 2nd field should be a SURNAME, but this is missing from your Plugin and missing from the 1st example above (I suspect a | is accidentally missing).
(2) The 3rd field should have the /Surname/ in GEDCOM format with forward slashes and Mixed Case, but your Plugin omits the slashes and uses UPPER CASE.
(3) Strictly speaking the Dates should be in GEDCOM format, which uses all UPPER CASE. The Plugins are OK, but the two examples above are not.

The above is consistent with the Wikipedia GENDEX web page.

I've changed it for the missing column, I did get the people at the new site to validate the file, but they obviously did not look too closely.

I had not remembered you had started one, I have now taken a look at your plugin and it looks to output all persons regardless of if they are on the web site, and won't cope if you use group sheets rather than individual summaries.

I see you are checking the baptism events etc, so I will probably add that in.

To keep it simple, my prototype did not examine the web page entries and just included everyone.

Did you also correct the /Surname/ part in 3rd field?

I agree that including Baptism/Christening if no Birth, and Burial if no Death is a good idea.

You might like to adopt my Date conversion functions:
function StrQualifiedDate(strDate,strQual)
function StrQuarterDate(strNum,strYear)
function StrGedcomDate(strDate)
which I think do a more thorough job of creating GEDCOM dates than your
function cleanDate(strDate).

I had thought it might be convenient to add it to my Improve Website or CD DVD HTML Plugin?

I have implemented a Create GenDex option within my Improve Website or CD DVD HTML Plugin.

This benefits from already selecting & memorising the website folder the user prefers to use.
It also offers options to exclude Individuals based on Living &/or Private flags.

Another question is what character encoding should be used, particularly for Names from foreign countries?
The Some Non-English Characters are not Showing Properly. What can I do? does not answer this question.

Should the gendex.txt file be encoded in Code Page 1252 characters as used within LUA, or should UTF-8 and HTML escape sequences be used as employed within the FH web pages??