Family History CD

mezentia · Post by **mezentia** » 31 Aug 2007 15:26

I like the feature in FH3 that allows you to create a Family Hsitory CD. But ... there's an awful lot of extra information I have that I want to add. Some of the information relates to specific individuals, some to a family, and some of simple historical interest, or relating to the area where my lot lived. The information consists of photographs, scanned documents, tables and other text. I also want on occasion to cross-refer people to other relatives where I have put other relevant information.

As far as I can see, there's no way to put this extrastuff in notes, except where the material can be added as plain text, and I can't see how to include hyperlinks in notes that work when a CD is created. So, although I can create separate html pages for the additional stuff, I can't find a way to link to these from an individual from the pages that FH creates. I don't want to have to edit an individual's automatically created page every time I re-create the CD.

I know there's a wish list item for more word-processing-like facilities in notes, but I can't see how this can be done whilst keeping to the basic text format of GEDCOM. However, if the XML version of GEDCOM were to be implemented, perhaps this would allow implementation a far more flexible notes facility. Perhaps a facility to convert text GEDCOM to XML GEDCOM could be made available?

I'd be interested to hear how other people overcome these types of problem with web site and CD creation.

I should add that I also use GEDMILL, which I find excellent, particuarly with the tree subset at the top of each page (another wish list item?) that makes navigation just that little bit easier, and I include the GEDMILL tree when I send a CD out to my family.

By the way, has anyone tried Microsoft Expression yet as an html editor for their FH website, and if so, how do you bring in all the files?

David

ID:2484

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 31 Aug 2007 15:55

What you could do is to put some 'tags' in say /**mypage//my title**/ and once the pages are generated simply do a global search and replace the
//** with and
**/ with

No idea on MS Expression, I only ever code pages in the PsPad text editor or php designer 2007.

mezentia · Post by **mezentia** » 03 Sep 2007 08:29

Jane

I understand your reply, but it doesn't really help [frown]. I would still need to find the relevent individuals' pages from about 6000 that are currently in my tree.

My feeling is that there must be lots of people, like me, who are starting to widen their researches to cover more aspects of their family haistory that just the bare bones (please excuse the apalling pun!). So, when it comes to presenting this material, we naturally start to look at the software we use to maintains our databases to help streamline presentation. In this context, using a more versatile form of notes that can include multimedia and format effects would be invaluable. But, as I said, I think this is limited by sticking to the text-based GEDCOM, and not implementing the XML standard.

It may be that implementing XML GEDCOM is jumping the gun a bit, but until someone makes a start, no-one else is likely to follow.

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 03 Sep 2007 08:34

No you don't need to find the pages, PSPAD and some other programs can search and replace text in a whole directory of files.

cb123 · Post by **cb123** » 03 Sep 2007 14:55

David,

You have hit on the major downfall of all genealogy software bar none: a noticeable lack of ability to tie in extraneous and contextual/historical info.

As far as I can tell, what others seem to do to compensate for this lack is to generate reports, 'books' or use the prog's 'publish' feature, getting the most info out of the database they can, then converting to rtf which they then work up as a word processor document.

The drawbacks of this method are obvious. Like you, and others who want something more than data storage out of genealogy software, I'm just waiting for the day when some software provider gets it right. When they do, it'll blow all competition out of the water!

Chuck.

jeemo · Post by **jeemo** » 03 Sep 2007 23:53

A few years ago when I was searching for a static GEDCOM to HTML converter, one of the main facilities I was looking for was the capacity to link to external pages I had written myself. I found only one programme with this capacity and that was GED-GEN (http://www.ged-gen.com/). It provides the capacity to link to both individuals and families and has proved invaluable in producing my site. I now use it to link to pages generated by Family Historian as well as pages I have written myself.
Just about everything can be customised and it allows withholding of living person data plus the capacity to use your own CSS file(s).
Until Family Historian provides the capability of creating links in its web pages, GED-GEN is a solution for the problem highlighted in this thread.
(I have nothing to do with the marketing of the programme. I'm just a very satisfied customer)

mezentia · Post by **mezentia** » 07 Sep 2007 13:56

Jane, I think PSPAD will help where I include static references to another web page, for example where I have a page I built and where I want to point to this page from several individuals' own entries. A lot of folks in my tree were chainmakers, and I have a page on a general chainmaking topic that I want to link to from these individuals, so here PSPAD will work. However, I think there will be a problem where I want to cross link pages for individuals, where I have placed large volumes of notes with one person that I dont want to repeat for every individual. If the tree is still being actively worked on, with people being added and sometimes taken away, I don't see how I can be sure that the generated page for each individual always has the same name.

This is the reason I proposde using the XML GEDCOM format, as this should, if I understand things correctly, allow a much greater degree of flexibility in what can be contained in Notes, including text formatting and reference to external objects and other web pages.

I note that the date on the proposed XML GEDCOM on the IGI site is a long time ago, and it's possibly not in the Latter Day Saints' interests to take it further if the 'standard' GEDCOM works OK for them, but I do think there's a market for a program that goes beyond being a simple genealogy database. Oh, if only I had kept my programming skills up to date, but I suspect that this is even beyond Fortran [grin][grin].

Perhaps Simon has a view on this?

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 07 Sep 2007 16:13

The pages generated by FH are named based on the ID so it should be easy to put static links to other pages, unless you regularly renumber your record ID's.

There is already a wish list item to support url style links in notes.

Post by **NickWalker** » 07 Sep 2007 19:54

mezentia said:
...This is the reason I proposde using the XML GEDCOM format, as this should, if I understand things correctly, allow a much greater degree of flexibility in what can be contained in Notes, including text formatting and reference to external objects and other web pages.

I note that the date on the proposed XML GEDCOM on the IGI site is a long time ago, and it's possibly not in the Latter Day Saints' interests to take it further if the 'standard' GEDCOM works OK for them, but I do think there's a market for a program that goes beyond being a simple genealogy database....

I think that Family Historian could still include options for formatted text, tables, etc. in notes without having to break the GEDCOM standard by using 'extensions' as already happens with things like Flags and the way images are handled, etc. e.g. a note could be recorded twice in the file, once using standard (unformatted) GEDCOM notes and a second time using Family Historian extension tags to allow formatted text (e.g. as Rich text or html). It would make the files bigger, but they are already relatively small (when compared to say an image file) so it wouldn't be a huge overhead and the advantages would certainly be worth it in my opinion.

Although Family Historian is a very popular program I suspect it isn't so widely used across the world to be able to bring in its own new GEDCOM XML standard to challenge the current version, in the way that, for example, Microsoft has been able to do because of its huge user base.

JonAxtell · Post by **JonAxtell** » 08 Sep 2007 11:39

For an alternative XML spec for genealogical purposes see http://www.cosoft.org/genxml/index.html.

As for FH breaking the Gedcom spec by supporting formatted text - it won't. Gedcom allows ANSI or ANSEL text which includes characters such as which are used in HTML tags and [ and ] which are used as forum style tags, so either method could be used. Even Rich Text is purely textual (http://www.biblioscape.com/rtf15_spec.htm). It does mean that if you exported a Gedcom (which FH doesn't have the concept of*) you would need to strip out the formatting but that's an easy job.

* Exporting a Gedcom includes concepts such as striping out living individuals which not even the split tree helper function (STHF) can do unless you do multiple passes and include flags or explicitly use a query to do the job which FH could easily do from a checkbox setting.

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