GenoPro Support Forum

How you want to send the HTML Help e-book (probably on CD) to your old grandmother that she can read it? Many old people do not have computer and 80% of other prefer to have something printed.

Do you want hand over work you have done (by building your family tree) to your grandson (who will be born in 2050)? Then forget about HTML! How he will read an old, broken CD-ROM ?

HTML has an advantage - it is small, easy to navigate and it is possible to put it on web.

If I look at the above quote, noting is good enough but ordinary paper.... But guess what, even ordinary paper is not good enough. That old grandma, is getting problems with her eyes and requires font size 20 to read text. So you're going to print new versions every week in multiple font sizes (since your nephew really prefers the arial-10 font), as long as you're making changes to the tree. Also, the hard copy paper is wearing out, and likely after your grandson is born, the paper is unreadably, and certainly out of date.

I agree that being able to print is nice, but it isn't the holy grail that everybody is looking for. I typically change my tree at least 3 times a week, with, for example 30 additional persons every week for the last 4 weeks (I now have 1600 persons in my tree). It is just unthinkable that I would be printing this for the approx. 40 family members that are looking at my website very regularly.

my $ 0.02,

Ronald

Edited: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 by rboshuis

That's also the reason why most of the popular genealogy softwares have many kind of printable reports (usually with many options how to generate them) included.

I'd like to know how other people work with the database (tree) "on the way"? Do you visit your relatives? How do you collect the informations? Maybe I just missed something.

And I ask myself another question: Ronald said that his relatives regularly look regularly at his pages with the genealogy. That's nice and I wish my relatives will do the same. On the other hand - do you think they will do the same within next 30,40 or 60 years? Some of my ancestors I have in my tree are from 1650 and I want that at least part of my work will last (will be accessible) many years  therefore I need to redistribute it to many places (relatives) the way that our descendants will be able to read it in 2100, 2200..... (hopefully).
I do not believe that HTML is good for it.

GenoPro is a good tool, it is going to be even better and it will be able to generate printable report too (I hope that at least as many reports as the other genealogy programs). The only think I want to do is to emphasize importance of the NICE printable reports.

If I visit my relatives, I typically take my laptop with me. If need be, I'll create a screenshot of the tree and zip the html report pages together and send that to the person who I want to check it or add new info. (Especially since I am using around 60 different Genomaps, one for each one of the different last names.)

However, I find it easiest to directly input all the results from my visits into Genopro, since it allows me to do additional checks. Often I found out that nephews were of slightly different parents that the interviewed people said, which I can then immediately check with them.

My ancestry tree now goes back to somewhere around 1550.. The way I save the data is by doing the following...

- provide a copy of all images, html, GENCOM and genopro .GNO and .XML file on a DVD (it doesn't fit a CD anymore) and provide that once to my relatives. It will happen this year during our family reunion. Besides that, I have a password protected website which has the whole tree including low-res fotos etc on it, so people can check the tree themselves. This allows them to quickly check whether I put newly provided data properly in the tree.

- Once I am happy enough with the whole thing, I'll start looking at an HTML2PDF converter (I know they exist) and will probably move everything into an PDF every now and then. However, even then, I won't have everything I have in the PDF. since that would also be an PDF file which doesn't fit a CD....(Most photos maps etc I have are around 600 KB jpegs, and I have a lot of those :-) )

rgds,

Ronald