Family Historian User Group

I am new to FH so forgive me if this area has been covered somewhere.

Once I have completed my tree I wish to distribute it on CD to family members.

How do I do this? I want the recipients to find looking at the tree a easy as possible and the media easy to access of not actually shown by default.

Any hints would be helpful

Regards
Adrian

ID:863

Hi Adrian,

You could use a program like GEDMill to create a set of HTML pages which you could put on a CD to send to your family members as almost all PC and MAC's would have a web browser on them. There are several excellent reports in FH, for example the narrative report. These are output in standard formats that most users would have software to view and you could also add extra notes yourself.

You can save charts in standard formats that most of your family could view without having to buy any new software. At present there is not a chart that will include all the people in your database but as the All-in-one chart is the second most voted for wish at the moment it may be looked at for a future release.

FH is a very good program for giving you standard alternatives for outputting your data plus you can create your own reports, if you like to do that sort of thing!

I hope that some of that helps.

All the best,
Martyn

As Martyn suggests gedmill works well another method is to use the standard FH reports and convert them to PDF using PDF995 or eDocprinter (links in the links section), your family then only need Acrobat reader to view them.

In addition you can 'print' charts to large paper sizes for the pdf giving people easy access to the information.

One problem for everyone is the 'when its finished one', I have been working on mine for 10 years and its not finished yet [grin]

Martyn, I could not print an all in one from my file, my all relations chart is 15 meters long, I dread to think how big an all in one would be.

Hello Jane,

I agree that a paper copy of a complete all-in-one chart may not be very practical. I’ve only been looking into my family tree for about eight months so my chart would not be nearly as extensive as yours but it would be quite big, but there are two reasons I would very much like to have the all-in-one chart. Firstly an electronic version would be handy to be able to check or explain some relationships. The second is that as I am a stepfather it is very hard to get some of the family tree views I, and members of my family, would like. If I could get a complete tree I could “cut” part of it out using a graphics program. Another way that this could be done is to be able to build a diagram based on a query, but I suspect that that may be more complicated than many users would want. At present either my close family or my stepchildren’s fathers family are not shown. With step parents being more common these days I think the all-in-one diagram would help a lot of them.

All the best,
Martyn

Thanks for your help and suggestions chaps and chapesses.

I have had a play with the reports and I think I will produce an html narrative report. Then edit it in MS Front-Page. Then bung the whole lot on a cd with the images being referenced from the cd. I recon that should do it. The added bunus being that it is then ready to publish on the web if I fancy going that way.

Thanks again for the tips.

Adrian

Why not use GEDMil? It's free, the link is on this site and the latest version can be customised to an extent.

It is certainly one worth considering as the resultant 'web page' can be read offline in IE or another browser that can read html.

vliet

Many thanks for everyone's advice. The more I learn about FH the more I am seeing the error of my ways (see my previous posting in this thread)

The GedMill program seems like a good idea.

I will have a look at it.

Thanks again

I beg the question, 'what is a completed tree?'
I have always considered that my tree has as many centres as there are persons and each one has her or his own tree.
The tree for a person goes as far as he/she wishes and if I was going to send details to that person I would include (in the first instance) only the immediate family as far as my researches have gone together with a diagram repeating the same information. Leaving it to the person to extend in any way he wants.

This, in my estimation, seems a reasonable way to handle distribution of information now I have to find a vehicle to make it work.

First, thanks for the Gedmill suggestion - very easy and very good.  

However Gedmill doesn't seem to let you print out reports, such as ancestor and descendant outlines. But I am a new user, so maybe I just haven't found out how. Also, if you try to save the reports as an HTML file or rich text file, you can do so, but it just doesn't look as good as within the programme.  Lines disappear and the thing changes from a very professional looking document to something that looks more like a draft.  I would like to be able to send a file  that looks like it does on my screen within FH; I guess that's not possible, but if not, it's rather disappointing.

Finally, I need a little advice on what happens exactly when one wishes to delete or insert one generation into a tree, and how to handle the changed links, on who is a parent of whom.  I also had a problem redoing things when  I realized that one particular entry was the child of a second wife rather than  the first.  I found it hard to change the links. Any advice gratefully received.

Philip Wilson  

To send reports from FH, the best way is to use one of the PDF capturing programs, like pdf995 or eDocPrinter.

I think direct PDF support is on the wish list for a latter version.

To change the parents of a child simply right click on the Family as Child line on the records window or all tab and select to attach the child to another family or create a new family for the child to belong to.

Has anyone had any problems with the PDF converter (PDF995).  I tried to convert a 49 page descendent report which included many images and was thus a big file.  It wouldn't do this properly, and I then deleted the corrupted file.  However it made my computer behave very slowly and strangely.  I tried again, this time halving the resolution and then 'printing' only half the pages.  This time, eventually, it did the job (the result was then about 64MB in size); however, the computer became even  more unreliable and has now been taken to hospital, because it closed down completely!  I am awaiting diagnosis. I cannot be 100%  certain that the problem was caused by the PDF conversion of such a big file, but it looks a bit like it.   Does anyone have a similar experience with this, and a solution: being able to convert to PDF seems to me a great way to send really presentable information to other family members. [confused] [confused]

Philip Wilson

How much memory do you have in your PC.

I have never had any problems with large numbers of pages, but I do have 1Gb of memory.

512 Mg

Philip

Thats a reasonalble minimum memory.

Try checking with PDF995 authors, you might also like to try using eDocPrinter and see if you have the same problem with that one.

Another free PDF 'printer' I have used is PrimoPDF which has worked quite well for me. It's availabel at:

http://www.primopdf.com

May be worth a try.

All the best,
Martyn