Family Historian User Group

[confused]
Every Time I try to create a webfile using Gedmill I get the following message :-
A problem was encountered while reading the GEDCOM file:

GEDmill 1.11.0
Linking adoptees.
Linking indi backreferences.
Joining multimedia fragments.
Ordering individual's mfrs.
ConvertMultimediaLinks() Exception Illegal characters in path. caught for \\.
Caught generic exception (line index=173947) : System.ArgumentException: Illegal characters in path.
  at
 System.IO.Path.CheckInvalidPathChars(String path)
  at System.IO.Path.Combine(String path1, String path2)
  at
 GEDmill.CGedcom.ConvertMultimediaLinks(ArrayList alMultimediaLinks, ArrayList& alUniqueFileRefs)
  at GEDmill.CGedcom.ParseFile()
Closing file
Closing progress window
All done.
Thread finished, result=Abort

Can anyone offer any Help.

Peter Driver  peter@peterdriver.net

ID:4401

If I had to make an educated guess from looking at the error (and I've never used Gedmill), I wonder if it is having problems understanding the relative addresses for multimedia used in FH v4 within project folders. Perhaps another Gedmill user will know if Gedmill supports v4 projects?

Assuming that '\\' is the path it looks like Gedmill can't cope with UNC format paths. These are paths starting with \ and are mainly occur on networked drives/computers.

GEDmill doesn't support projects or relative addresses for media; it will take a UNC format path for input and output and (once remapped before using GEDmill) I *think* my media files also all have UNC format paths.

Looking into the issue a bit further the error is due to the characters. I had been assuming that \Goto to jump to the line mentioned in your error and you should be able to work out from the data near to it. Make sure that word wrapping is off, check at Format->Wordwrap, otherwise the goto option will be disabled.

I've run a couple of tests, and can confirm:

1. If your multimedia links in a project are relative addresses, GEDmill runs without errors and produces valid HTML but omits all references to the relatively-addressed multimedia files in the output. To overcome this, I make a copy of the entire project structure in which I then:

• use Tools > work with external file links to re-map the media directory into the project data folder on my NAS drive using its UNC-format path.
• remove all information I don't want to publish

2. GEDmill DOES correctly handle UNC-format paths for multimedia links.

Thank you , This sounds fine to someone who Knows what they are doing, all I have done is open Gedmill and put in the path to my tree, I will have to find someone who can understand what you are telling me to do !.
I hope that I can get it worked out .

Regards (Oldman ) Peter Driver

Peter,

I think the first thing you need to do is work through Jon's suggestion. If you are willing to send me your GEDcom by email, I am very happy to help.

Helen

Just thought of another way to find the \ path. Go to FH's Work with External File Links option available in the Tools menu. You should then find it showing with a cross against it. You can then click the edit button to fix the angle brackets. You might also be able to use the Goto button to jump to the multimedia record in question, if it is a record.