Clive Blackaby
09-11-2004, 12:53 AM
Does anyone know .....
Is there such a thing as a set of standards for GEDcom files?
And if there is who, if anyone owns / controls it and is (presumably) stuck with the unenviable task of trying - evidently without too much success - to persuade the various producers of FT software to actually stick to it?
(Perhaps that is a rhetorical question)
Failing that, is there some smart boffin out there who has written a program which will convert the various diverse versions of GEDcom from one to another?
I use Family Tree Maker (FTM) not because it's good, but because it's what I've got, and I haven't yet found anything that is so much better that I want to spring a load of cash on yet another program. It draws passable trees if you don't have too many second marriages, and no cousin marriages. (I could give them a list of improvements especially for their "All - in - one" tree, but they ignored the last one)
I also flip (via GEDcom) into Family Historian, whose tree drawing ability has quite a bit to recommend it - you can expand and collapse branches which is good (FTM please note and copy!!!) - but it is a bit rigid. I use it as much as anything for the reporting / query capabilities which are far in advance of FTM.
But it is so irritating when FTM outputs GEDcom files with About, Before, (etc) as "ABT.", "BEF." and FH refuses to understand it unless you delete the "."
Similarly if you manage to persuade the National Burial Index to give you a GEDcom extract, then import it into FTM, it slings out all of the AGE at BURIAL records as an unrecognised format.
So I have had to replace them all with an estimated date of birth. Means fiddling around with editing Gedcom files or entering the data manually, which rather defeats the object of using GEDcom
Yes I can set up an edit macro which will deal with most of these, and the other apparent non-conformances, but WHY.
End of Rant!!!!:mad:
Is there such a thing as a set of standards for GEDcom files?
And if there is who, if anyone owns / controls it and is (presumably) stuck with the unenviable task of trying - evidently without too much success - to persuade the various producers of FT software to actually stick to it?
(Perhaps that is a rhetorical question)
Failing that, is there some smart boffin out there who has written a program which will convert the various diverse versions of GEDcom from one to another?
I use Family Tree Maker (FTM) not because it's good, but because it's what I've got, and I haven't yet found anything that is so much better that I want to spring a load of cash on yet another program. It draws passable trees if you don't have too many second marriages, and no cousin marriages. (I could give them a list of improvements especially for their "All - in - one" tree, but they ignored the last one)
I also flip (via GEDcom) into Family Historian, whose tree drawing ability has quite a bit to recommend it - you can expand and collapse branches which is good (FTM please note and copy!!!) - but it is a bit rigid. I use it as much as anything for the reporting / query capabilities which are far in advance of FTM.
But it is so irritating when FTM outputs GEDcom files with About, Before, (etc) as "ABT.", "BEF." and FH refuses to understand it unless you delete the "."
Similarly if you manage to persuade the National Burial Index to give you a GEDcom extract, then import it into FTM, it slings out all of the AGE at BURIAL records as an unrecognised format.
So I have had to replace them all with an estimated date of birth. Means fiddling around with editing Gedcom files or entering the data manually, which rather defeats the object of using GEDcom
Yes I can set up an edit macro which will deal with most of these, and the other apparent non-conformances, but WHY.
End of Rant!!!!:mad: