Options

Options must be chosen before a chart is produced.

Choosing Birth Brief, Selective Tree, Full Chart, Descendant Sheet, Ancestor Sheet or Photochart from the Options menu opens a dialog box containing options available for that chart. Certain options, such as graphics line width, are common to more than one or to all charts: in this case, the setting chosen will be applied to each chart. Note that valid settings for the graphics line width are 1 to 10: the width shown on the screen display may differ slightly from the width on the printed page. When you exit the program, options are stored in the configuration file, and they will be restored to their previous values the next time you start the program.

For the full chart, you can set options for Page numbers, Vertical alignment, Links and Add title, and a range of Boxchart options, as well as choosing to display all relatives, ancestors only or descendants only.

The No page breaks option for the full chart should be chosen if you wish to save the chart as an image file in either PNG (Portable Network Graphics) , JPEG, GIF, TIFF or DjVu formats, or to save to DXF or HP-GL/2; and is suitable also for saving to PDF, HTML, SWF, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), PostScript, or LaTeX formats. This option formats the chart for a single page, however large, and the chart will therefore not be suitable for printing (except on a large-format plotter), but will usually be more compact than if formatted for multiple pages. To save the chart as an image file, or in PDF, RTF, HTML, SWF, SVG, PostScript, DXF, HP-GL/2 or LaTeX formats, choose Save from the menu in Print Preview mode.

Margins

By default, the program prints over the full printable area of the page. By choosing Margins from the Options menu, page margins may be set, which have effect on every page, and chart margins, which have effect only at the edges of the chart. Of the latter, only the bottom and left margins will commonly have any function. Setting top and right margins may cause the program to spread the chart across extra pages if necessary.

The bottom chart margin is implemented subject to space, without the chart spreading on to extra pages. You can force the chart to embrace extra pages by adding a large enough chart top margin.

These margins are relative to the printable area on the page. They are specified not in inches but in lines and columns, these units corresponding to the height and width of text characters. If, therefore, you increase the font size, the actual size of the margins in inches will also increase.

The full chart is laid out horizontally starting from the left. If you wish to centre the chart horizontally across the pages, so that there is approximately equal space to the left and the right of the chart, you can do so by choosing a suitable left chart margin. If you have a lot of space at the top of the chart, choosing the option 'centre' in the vertical alignment group in the full chart options dialog box will position the chart approximately in the centre. You can position it more accurately by choosing instead a suitable bottom chart margin. Choosing to align at the bottom of the pages will often minimise the number of pages to be printed.

Printer

Choosing Printer from the Options menu opens a dialog box displaying the current printer settings. When you start the program, the default printer is selected.

Clicking Settings opens the print setup dialog box, enabling you to choose the printer, and specify the paper size and orientation (portrait or landscape). All media sizes are supported, including long-axis plots which can be up to 300 feet long on large-format plotters.

When charts are produced for printing, they are formatted for the selected printer. If the printer is changed after a chart has been produced, it might not be possible to print the chart because the printable area supported by the printer may be different, even if the paper size is the same. The printer should therefore be selected before producing charts.

Fonts

Choosing Fonts from the Options menu opens the standard fonts dialog box, allowing you to select the font to be used in charts and reports.

Some fonts are continuously scalable, so that you are not restricted to the specific sizes shown in the relevant listbox. Any positive integer value within the range 3 to 20 can be entered in the edit field above the listbox: a sample will be displayed if you then click on the edit field of one of the other listboxes. (You can use larger fonts for the title of a chart).

The choice of font will affect not only the legibility of the chart, but also the layout of the families across the pages. You may wish to choose a font which enables the family groups to utilise as far as possible the full width and height of the page, where any further increase in font size will cause family groups to be shifted onto adjoining pages.

The chosen font will apply only to the Selective Tree and Full Chart, as well as to reports. The Birth Brief chart is formatted to use only the program's default font.

Colours (Chart)

Choosing Colours (Chart) from the Options menu opens the standard colour selection dialog box.

The 'custom colours' in the dialog box display the 16 colours used in the boxchart to colour the boxes. You can change each of these colours by selecting it, adjusting the controls on the right hand side to produce the desired colour, then clicking 'Add to custom colours'. Clicking 'OK' will save all your changes.

The program's default colours may be restored by opening the 'Full Chart Options' dialog, clicking 'Boxchart options...', then 'Restore default colours'.

Colours (HTML/Report)

Choosing Colours (HTML/Report) from the Options menu opens a dialog box allowing colours to be selected for reports as well as HTML charts.

Gedcom

Choosing Gedcom from the Options menu opens a dialog box offering numerous options to customise the behaviour of the program. You can specify how to handle multiple names, whether or not to store notes in separate records and the linelength to be used for notes. If the linelength is set to a value greater than 0 but less than 32 or greater than 224 the value will default to 64. If the linelength is set to zero, this is equivalent to setting the option for linelength and style to conform to established practice in any file: the program will adopt the linelength used in each file that is opened.

The following options are also available:

When creating a new gedcom dataset, all options will take immediate effect. In the case of an existing dataset, it may be necessary to run the Rewrite Dates or Rewrite Notes routines for some options to take effect.

Options which affect how dates are written in the gedcom data will also determine how they are written in charts and reports. Dates are displayed in this form in View mode in the Details pages. When the option for double dates is chosen, only the earlier year is displayed in the Main pages or when editing.

GWintree handles just 3 tags - WWW, EMAIL and FACT - which were not supported by the GEDCOM 5.5 standard, but were added under the draft 5.5.1 specification; and this has never been formally adopted. In order for a file to conform to the 5.5 standard, these tags must be treated as custom tags - peculiar to this program - by writing them with a leading underscore: that is, _WWW, _EMAIL and _FACT. Programs which conform to the 5.5 standard may handle these tags in this way, or not at all.

Within NOTE fields (and some other text fields), CONC tags specify that text on successive lines in the gedcom file should be concatenated without adding a space between, and linebreaks are permitted in the middle of words. CONT tags in contrast require linebreaks to occur between words, and specify that a space should be added between lines. In some gedcom files, CONC tags are treated like CONT tags, contrary to the gedcom specification. If the related option is not correctly chosen for a given file, spaces may occur in the middle of words, or two words may sometimes run together with no space between.

In some gedcom files, source citations do not refer to source records, all the data being included instead within the citation. GWintree supports the option to use non-record sources, but only for files that do not already contain source records. Source records may contain more information than non-record sources, under the GEDCOM specification: consequently conversion from source records to non-record sources would risk the loss of data, and this is not supported. If the option to use non-record sources is selected, source records cannot be created.

If the option to use non-record sources is not selected, then when a file is opened in GWintree, all source information is converted to use records, if necessary. This may result in the same source being listed more than once. However, if you choose the option to combine sources having the same title - that is, assuming them to represent the same source - then all sources entitled, for instance "Birth Certificate" will be combined, although this title may refer to certificates for different people in different source citations.

In some gedcom files, an individual record may contain more than one instance of the Name tag. One instance may, for example, specify a woman's name by birth, and one her married name. The GEDCOM 5.5 standard specifies that the preferred instance, which in this case should be her name by birth, should appear last in the file. In practice, however, the apparently preferred instance occurs first in many gedcom files.

There is no basis specified by the GEDCOM 5.5 standard for interpreting the occurrence of multiple name tags, and GWintree loads only one instance. However, if you edit an individual for whom a second, undisplayed, Name tag appears in the file, the undisplayed data will be preserved unchanged.

Preferences

Choosing Preferences from the Options menu opens a dialog box offering several options to customise the behaviour of the program. You can specify the handling of multiple names, and also the following items: