Generations Book Preview

The main use of this format is to help optimizing your data for exporting to a book using the GEDitCOM II book creation process. A second use is to print a narrative story about one individual.

Optimization Process

Using this format to optimize a book is done as follows:

• Switch to this format using using the "Open Format" submenu command.
• Open each individual who will be exported to the book (you could do a trial book export to see who is there).
• Read each section of the text on each individual. The text is formatted by methods very close to the book process. The output is not identical, because the book uses the LaTeX typesetting language while this format uses the GEDitCOM II interface language, but they should be close enough to help optimize a book:
  1. If the section looks good, go on to the next setion.
  2. If somethings does not read well, click the "Edit" button in the left margin next to that section. The window will change to an editing window where you can change the content used to format that section. The editing page may have some hints on how to enter data for the best results in a book. Make some changes and then switch back to preview to see how it works.
• Sections in red mean that individual currently has no data for that part of the book. If you have that kind of data, click the "Edit" button and add it.
• One of the best ways to enhance a book is to write notes. The notes can be in a section on the main individual or associated with events and attributes when you edit those sections.

Creating the Book

Once all records are optimized, you can create the book and do a final check on the output. As mentioned above, the final result will be slightly different than the display in this format because of the different ways they are created. To help typesetting the book, this format has complete support for Book Style records.

Printing Features

A second use of this script is to print a narrative on one individual. To print that report, open any individual and choose "Print" command. The "Edit" buttons and red sections will not appear in the printed output.

Generations Book Preview Properties (or Preferences)

• You change this format's fonts (and their colors) using the GEDitCOM II preferences. The available fonts are:
  • Button Text: The text for buttons.
  • Check Box Text: The text next to check boxes.
  • Editing Text: The text used in editing fields.
  • Hyperlink Text: The text used for clickable links between records and for links to web sites.
  • Label Text: Prominent labels for genealogy data.
  • Static Text: Text for most plain text fields in the record display and labels for lower-level data.
  • Popup Menu Text: The text used in pop-up menus.
  • Name Label: fonr for individual's name at the start of the display.
  • Paragraph: font for paragraph text in the book display output.
  • Child List: font for lists of children in the main individual.
  • Section Label: Text used to label editing sections of the record data such as grouped boxes for editing.
• You change the format's colors using the GEDitCOM II preferences. The available colors are:
  • Back Button Border: The color for the border around the "Back to Record" button in all editing screens.
  • Block Color: The color for square boxes used to indicate some items in lists (e.g., events and attributes).
  • Editing Background: Background color of editing fields
  • Editing Box Background: Background color for group boxes used in collections of data in the editing screens.
  • Table Cell Background: Background color of cells in the rows of some tables (e.g., list of children)
  • Table Header Background: Background color of cells in the header row of some tables (e.g., list of children)
  • Table Lines: Color for lines in some tables (e.g., list of children)
  • Window Background: Background color of the window (white is best for printing).
• The custom options in the "Editing" section of the GEDitCOM II preferences are:
  • Paragraph Line Height: For better readability in record display, this format adds extra space between lines in fields having multiple lines of text. You can pick any number such as 1 for single spacing, 2 for double spacing, or fractional spacings are allowed.
  • Notes Omission Level: This number determines if any notes should be omitted from the book (and therefore not displayed in this format). The options are:
    • 0: include all notes
    • 1: omit notes marked as diftribution for owner
    • 2: omit notes marked as diftribution for family or owner
    • 3: omit all notes
  • Vertical Shift of Edit Field Labels: Extra shift added to all labels before text editing fields. It is normally 3, but might need to be different. If you change fonts and the labels and the text fields do not line up well, adjust this value to realign them; positive shifts the label down while negative shifts it up.
  • Vertical Shift of Button Labels: Extra shift added to all labels before buttons and popup menus. It is normally 3, but might need to be different. If you change fonts and the labels and buttons do not line up well, adjust this value to realign them; positive shifts the label down while negative shifts it up.
  • Thumbnails Per Row: Linked multimedia objects are displayed as thumbnails when editing media data. This option determines the number of thumbnails per row in the display and thus can be used to control the size of the thumbnail images.

Alternate Languages

Because of the way this format tries to combine data from the file into paragraphs, the format is only suitable for English and for files whose data is in English.