Wednesday, June 20, 2007 - Wed, 20 Jun 2007

I was merrily working away on converting the Help file to CHM format, and since I have to redo all the graphics, I thought I might as well update the Tutorial.

While doing that, I pondered a few visual features of the Everything Report that have been bothering me. I don’t know why I set the default to be to list the children of each family. The children immediately follow, so that information is somewhat redundant and will not be often be needed as a list. So I turned the default off.

Parents had a similar redundancy. For children in the direct line, the parents are easy to find by scanning up the file for the next higher generation, so that default is now off. Instead I created a separate tag for the parents of spouses. This you usually want on, since if those parents are listed, they are elsewhere in the report.

Next was the ID number and Generation level that was tagged onto the end of each person’s name. Having these in this spot clutters the all-important name with less needed info. It’s much cleaner to move them. The ID is now at the right of the separating line. The generation level is now gone (it really was pretty useless) and is replaced by a generation offset number, if at least 15 generations are shown. This looks much nicer, and it is now easy to scan for ID numbers when needed, yet they are out of the way. The generation offset now has obvious meaning where it is, and won’t appear unless you’ve got a very deep tree.

So these things are important enough that as soon as I finish the Tutorial, I’ll want to release yet another interim version. I’m sure you’ll like these improvements.