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This is as yet a new page - regarding software used to produce some of the output pages , i.e. images that adorn this site.
I started with as many free software packages as were freely available. I do not see the point of spending money on software, when much is free. I recommend textpad as a good free text editor form www.textpad.com. My version was purchased, but just because I was impressed with the software.
There are many free software packages available for creating your Family Tree, and in the first instance, I chose the PAF5.5 from the LDS site at for example http://www.uvpafug.org/software.htm
From this software, that is pretty good, I moved on to trying out some of the Legacy company software, and although it was free, and not bad - I did not see a reason to not use the free software. originally,
As a side note, from using the PAF5.5, you are able to create a working version of your family tree and then export to GEDCOM (If you have no idea about what I am talking about - then accept that GEDCOM is the standard format that you need to end up with!)
Anyway, I tried a free version of Legacy, and there is a working version on my site at legacy/Jul4/index.htm.
Then I discovered some free software called gedbrowser. Legacy creates some pretty web pages, but they were not particularly appealing as far as working out the family tree. Or so I thought!
So from an uninformed , unbiased perspective, I recommend these (about £35 cost)
Legacy and treedraw for Legacy, both from:
So what can we do with these packages? Well,. here are some examples.
trees/July4-1.emf trees/July4-2.bmp
The .bmp image is rather a large file, but impressive - except an error I have just spotted in my original file!.
You will need the treeviewer software too - which is freely available shareware for redistribution. It will take at maximum for even the slowest internet connections about ten minutes to download. This will be less than a minute for fast internet connections. It is at treeviewer download
But, if you don't want to download this software, then try my .gif files instead. I was recommended to use another free piece of software called MWSnap which saves a very large .bmp file as quite a small .gif file. The software is available from : MWSnap download and review - screen capture tool from SnapFiles
This is a seriously good piece of software. I opened a 50MB .bmp image and saved it as a .gif file and it reduced the size to 121kb - WOW. These gif files are now in the trees folder too. Try this trees/July4-2.gif
Using this excellent software you can view any of the files that have a file extension .tdr, eg my file Aug2.tdr in the trees directory which is 86kb in size against a .bmp image which would be 56 MB ! I will come up with a better solution soon.
To use the viewer, there is a Globe that you can use to move around the picture. Click on one of the arrows and then click on the centre of the globe and drag you cursor around the globe.
OK, so you now have this massive family tree and you want it printed ? Try this site http://www.jigrah.co.uk
Enjoy.
Kevan
