Please report any problems or comments and suggestions to me at the e-mail address below. I will attempt to assist both registered and unregistered users with questions and problems.
|
support@ged-gen.com
E-Mail Support:
|
http://www.ged-gen.com Visit the GED-GEN website:
|
An important goal in developing GED-GEN was flexibility. If you're like me, you find many software programs don't do exactly what you want. Unfortunately complete flexibility leads to complicated configuration options. I have tried to balance flexibility with certain fixed features. If you find GED-GEN still doesn't do exactly what you want, please submit a problem report as described above. I will consider making custom changes for registered users.
Here are some tips for using GED-GEN more effectively.
If you exclude living individuals, they will not appear on any family page. This may make some family pages unreachable from any other family page. However every family page generated will be reachable from an index page.
For example if the parents of a deceased child are living, and you exclude living individuals, the deceased child will appear on a family page without its parents listed. This creates a "gap" in the flow of your family pages for someone following the parental or spousal links. Such a page would only be reachable through the child's name in the index.
A similar situation occurs if your GEDCOM file contains individuals that are not associated with a parental or spousal family. GED-GEN generates a family page for the individual, but it will contain no links to other family pages. Such a page is accessible only via the index.
After you use GED-GEN to generate your family pages, you may wish to include HTML links to these pages within other web pages on your website. For instance if you have a biographical web page for an ancestor, you might have a link to their corresponding family page.
Keep in mind that if you update your family data, re-export a GEDCOM file, and re-run GED-GEN, the files generated may have different names. If you add or remove families, or change which individuals are exported, your genealogy program might number the families differently. GED-GEN uses these family numbers to create unique web page file names.
See the discussion about Family Page References for more details. Always test the links in your other web pages to verify they link correctly to your GED-GEN-generated files.
If you want more control over what is generated for individuals in your GEDCOM file, use your favorite genealogy program to export only the desired individuals and/or information about them. Or, use any of the widely available programs that change a GEDCOM file by filtering such information.
For instance you could use your genealogy program to create a report listing only living individuals. You could then export the individuals in that report to a GEDCOM file and then run GED-GEN.
When transferring your web pages to your website, remember to transfer the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file. GED-GEN automatically creates this file in your destination folder. It is usually named base.css, but will have the same file name prefix as the other pages (e.g., grpbase.css). If this file is missing, your family pages will appear without the colors, fonts, text positioning, and background image you specified.
Also remember to transfer all associated image files (.gif and .jpg) and your biography and narrative web pages to your website. These files must be transferred to the same relative folder paths on your website as they were to the destination folder on your own computer. If these files are missing or if they are in a different folder, the links to them will result in a "Page not found" error message.
Your GEDCOM file contains individuals who are not associated with any families. Since these individuals do not appear as children or as spouses on any family page, GED-GEN creates a family page for them. The only way to navigate to one of these "extra" family pages is via the individual's name on the index page.
This situation may occur when you use your favorite genealogy program and do not enter a spouse or children for an individual. It may also occur if you restrict which individuals are exported to the GEDCOM file. Suppose you have entered an individual and their spouse to form a family, and only the spouse is living. When you later export only deceased individuals to a GEDCOM file, the spouse is not included. In this case the exported individual is not associated with any family.
If you choose to exclude living individuals on the Features tab, then living individuals will not appear at all. In this case GED-GEN will only process, and count, deceased individuals. If all individuals in a family are living, the whole family is excluded. An individual is usually considered living if there is no date of death specified.
You have not entered dates in the date of death fields. GED-GEN usually considers an individual deceased if the date of death is not empty. If you do not know when an individual died, specify UNKNOWN before you export your GEDCOM file. How you do this depends on your genealogy program. Some may use the terms DEAD or DECEASED. If it is another term, you should also run GED-GEN and click the Options button. Then select the Program tab. On the Program tab, select the "GEDCOM" tab and enter the term your genealogy program uses in place of DEAD or DECEASED.
You can also enable a cut-off year under "Privacy Filters" on the Features tab. Individuals born in or before the cut-off year are considered deceased. This method is less accurate because such individuals may in fact still be living.
If you choose to include source citations on the Features tab, you have the option of displaying footnotes either at the bottom of the family page, or in a separate frame window at the bottom of your browser. If you choose to display them in a separate frame window, then GED-GEN generates three Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files per family.
The first file instructs the browser to use two frame windows. The second file is the family page that is displayed in the top frame window. The third file contains the footnotes displayed in the bottom frame window. If you want to generate fewer files, then select the option for displaying footnotes at the bottom of the family page. Then only one HTML file is generated per family. It contains both the family page and the footnotes.
If you include links to GED-GEN web pages on your own web pages, they may become invalid if you re-generate using a different GEDCOM file. Each time you export a GEDCOM file, your favorite genealogy program may renumber the families. This may happen if you add or delete families or you change which individuals are exported to the GEDCOM file.
GED-GEN uses a family reference number as the file name for each family page it generates. If this reference number changes, the name of the family web page file will also change. Consequently the link you define on your own web page must change too. You should always test the links in your own web pages after you re-generate web pages. Note the links in and between GED-GEN web pages will always be correct since they are re-generated each time.
Chances are you have not specified a proper relative folder path for your home page or biography pages. GED-GEN assumes relative paths for the links on the web pages it generates. Once you transfer your web pages to your website at your Internet Service Provider (ISP), an absolute folder path would probably not work. For instance if you specify your home page file as "\public_html\index.html," GED-GEN will generate a link using that path and file. However at your ISP, the "public_html" folder may really be "\users\account\yourname\public_html."
A relative folder path is always relative to the destination folder you specify on the Files tab in GED-GEN. Thus if your destination folder is "C:\public_html\groups" and your home page is in "C:\public_html," the proper relative path is "..\index.html." The link on a web page in "\public_html\groups" would move up one folder to find "index.html." This link will work on your computer and also after you transfer your web pages to your ISP.
The easiest way to specify a relative path is to click next to the input field where you specify a folder or file name. This assumes you have already specified a destination folder.
Chances are you have not specified a proper relative folder path for your image files or the background image file. See the answer to the preceding question. Verify that the image file exists in the relative folder path you specified. Also remember your image files when you transfer your GED-GEN pages to your website at your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Probably not, but you can specify a different destination folder and then re-generate your web pages. GED-GEN uses relative folder paths when it generates the links between your family web pages. If you were to copy the generated files to another folder, chances are the relative paths would be different and the links would be invalid.
When you click the View or Help buttons, GED-GEN attempts to launch your Internet browser to display a web page. An Internet browser is a program like Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. You may see the message: "This file either does not exist, it is not accessible, or there is no Internet browser associated with files of this type."
First, the web page it is trying to display may not exist. If you click View before you have generated any web pages, there may not yet be a file to display. If you click Help, you may have since deleted or moved the help files, or you moved the GED-GEN program without moving the help files. Secondly, a file is inaccessible if another program has it opened exclusively. This might occur if you are editing a file with another program and then try to view it at the same time using GED-GEN.
Otherwise your computer may not be configured to associate an Internet browser with web page files. Normally files with an extension of ".html" are automatically associated with an Internet browser. To make this association, follow your Internet browser's instructions, or configure the file types in your Windows operating system. Check your computer's help facility for instructions.
There is another application running that is intercepting GED-GEN's request to open a web page (.html) file. Close other running applications, one at a time, and try the View or Help command again until you determine the offending application. When you close that application, your Internet browser should display the web page properly.
This behavior is due to the Windows operating system. The file association for HTML files may be configured to use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE). When a request is made to open an HTML file, Windows uses DDE to send the request to any running application that can process it. If another application does process it, Windows does not start your Internet browser as GED-GEN expects.
For example, Microsoft Photo Editor accepts a request to open a web page, but it does not display it. Since it accepts the request, Windows does not open the Internet browser and the View or Help command appears to do nothing. If you close Microsoft Photo Editor and try the command again, it should launch your Internet browser to display the web page.
GED-GEN assumes that web pages are associated with an Internet browser. Your web page editor has changed this behavior so that files with an ".html" extension cause it to open the file. For best results, change the file types on your computer so that web pages are associated with your Internet browser. Or, once the file is loaded in your web page editor, use the editor's viewer feature to see the web page.
If the text on your family pages is misaligned, or appears centered on the page rather than left-justified, or if some words appear exceptionally small or large, chances are it's the headers and/or footers you specified. Click the Options button, then the Headers tab. If you included any HTML formatting, be sure that you specify a closing tag for every beginning tag that requires one. For instance if you centered your family page header using <div align="center">, then don't forget the corresponding </div> closing tag. Also check that any <font> has a closing </font>.
This symbol is a placeholder for a link to another family page. It is displayed in place of a spouse's name, when that name should not or cannot be displayed. This occurs in two cases.
If an individual's spouse is living and you have chosen to exclude living individuals, then ">>>" is displayed as the link to the individual's family page. The living spouse will not appear on that family page, and therefore his or her name is not used as a link to the page.
If a child on a family page has children, ordinarily the name of the child's spouse is used as a link to their family page. However, if the name of the spouse is unknown (i.e., empty), then ">>>" is displayed as the link. To avoid this situation, specify UNKNOWN for the names of any unknown husbands or wives in your family data file. Using this convention also allows unknown individuals to appear in the index.