Save your family tree

When you have created your family tree, you can save the chart in a variety of formats by choosing Save from the menu in Print Preview mode. You can save the chart in HTML, RTF (Rich Text Format), SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), Postscript or LaTeX formats, as a PDF (Portable Document Format) file, or as an image file in PNG (Portable Network Graphics) or JPEG format.

To save the chart as an image or PDF, SVG or Postscript file, choose 'No page breaks' in the 'Full Chart' dialog before producing the chart. If you wish, however, you can save your chart as a PDF or Postscript file in a form suitable for printing by choosing the 'With page breaks' option. In this case, the chart will be broken up into separate pages within the PDF or Postscript file. In order to ensure that this file might be printed on different printers, you should allow adequate page margins. You can add margins by choosing Margins from the Options menu.

Saving your chart in RTF format will allow you to open the file in Microsoft Word, edit it if desired, and save it as a Word document. However, Word imposes a maximum page dimension of 22 inches. To save a chart larger than this to RTF format, it must be broken up into separate pages by choosing the 'With page breaks' option.

Saving your chart in HTML format will allow it to be viewed in a web browser. If you choose 'No page breaks', the chart will be saved to a single file; if you choose 'With page breaks', each page will be saved to a separate file, with navigation links to enable you to move from page to page by clicking on the appropriate link. You can increase the size of each HTML page by choosing a large printer page size, such as A3. Note that, owing to limitations of the HTML format, certain options, in particular coloured links and non-rectangular boxes for the boxchart, cannot be reproduced in HTML.

When you save your chart as a LaTeX file, it cannot be viewed directly, but must be typeset by means of one of the TeX distributions, such as teTeX.

When you save your chart in PNG or JPEG format, the image is saved at the same magnification as it appears on the screen (except in the case of minimum magnification for the 'With page breaks' option). When you save your chart in PDF, RTF, HTML, SVG, Postscript or LaTeX formats, the result is the same regardless of the magnification.

Files in Portable Document Format can be viewed by the free Acrobat reader, which allows you to zoom in and out to view the chart. Information in the file is stored in a vector format - not as the individual coloured dots that make up an image, but as the instructions to place lines or text on the screen or paper. Consequently, the image quality is not affected by magnification; but the text can be reproduced correctly only if the same font is available when viewing the chart as was used to produce it. If the correct font is not available, Acrobat (or any other reader) will substitute a similar font, and this is likely to impair the appearance of the chart.

This is true also for files in Postscript format, on which the PDF format is based. Postscript files, whilst intended primarily for printing, can be viewed by the free Ghostview viewer.

The Acrobat reader, and postscript interpreters, guarantee the availability only of 14 fonts: namely courier, times and helvetica (corresponding, under Windows, to the Truetype fonts "courier new", "times new roman" and "arial"), each in regular, bold, italic and bolditalic styles, and also symbol and zapfdingbats. If your chart contains any other TrueType or Type1 font, it will be embedded in the file, so that it is available when the chart is viewed or printed, except that in some cases embedding may not be permitted. Where the chart contains bold or italic fonts, these will only be preserved if they are available as separate font faces - where there are separate files in your fonts folder. In many cases, there is only one file, and bold and italic styles are derived by the operating system for display on the screen or printing. In this case, they will be lost in the PDF or Postscript representations, except that in Postscript an italic style will be simulated by slanting the font.

Postscript and PDF are the only formats suitable for producing very large charts for printing on a large-format plotter. Some plotters can produce plots up to 5 x 300 feet, and support postscript. However, the PDF format incorporates a maximum page dimension of 200 inches, and a chart with a page dimension larger than 200 inches may appear blank in the Acrobat reader. Postscript does not impose any such formal limit, but Ghostview may be unable to display very large charts.

Portable Network Graphics is a lossless image format, and is therefore better suited to this type of image than JPEG, since it will preserve the sharpness of the text - JPEG is a lossy format, and would cause text to appear slightly blurred or smudged. The PNG format is supported by many programs, including web browsers and Microsoft Word. Many graphics programs will allow you to convert PNG files into other formats, if you require them.

Scalable Vector Graphics provides an HTML-like graphics format expected to become widely used in web pages, and increasingly supported by web-browsers.

Of these various formats, Postscript, PDF and LaTeX are supported only for text represented using the ISO-8859-1 or Windows codepage 1252 encodings.