Options

Options must be chosen before a chart is produced.

Choosing Birth Brief, Selective Tree, Full Chart or Descendant Sheet from the Options menu opens a dialog box containing options available for that chart. Certain options, such as graphics line width, are common to two or 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) or JPEG formats, and is suitable also for saving to PDF, HTML, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), Postscript or LaTeX formats. This 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, SVG, Postscript 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.

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

Choosing Colours 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'.

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:

·Scan and fix errors on loading Gedcom file

·Automatically load last file used, on program startup

·Display options dialogs when producing charts

·Combine sources with same title, on conversion to records

·Write Gedcom 5.5.1 tags as custom tags

·Record date and time of changes to records

·Display tooltips

·Hide 'document' page

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.

In some gedcom files, source citations do not refer to source records, all the data being included instead within the citation. In this case, when the file is opened in GWintree, source information is converted to use records. 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.