About a year ago I made a post explaining my experiences in attempting to create a family heritage book. At the time I was unsuccessful. This has changed. Will explain what has happened over the last 12 months.

Background:

Use WordPerfect to manage my journal output. My choice of output is 5.1. A year ago I was using WordPerfect version 12 running under XP Home with 512m memory. Up to that point had been able to generate journal documents with a name index without any problems. Things were changing though as I was beginning to accumulate pictures of my ancestors and my living cousins. When the number of exhibits (photos) were less than 100, didn't have any problems to speak of. When the photo numbers increased to over 150, began to run into difficulties with the word processore software. When editing the pictures, the computer's performance started to come to a halt and ultimately WordPerfect crashed. Was needing to "save" after every picture edit. Never even got to creating a name index.

Decided that I would double my memory to 1,048 megs and this I did. While performance increased, WordPerfect continued to crash, not as often, but sufficient times to be irritating, to say the least.

Let me go back a bit an explain the situation. The subject family goes back 11 generations. There are 1,226 members. At the fifth generation, about the year 1800, the family branches out five ways and each of these family lines has been detailed to the present. I researched two branches and helped in several others. The fifth line was mainly researched by a cousin who I did not even know when I started on this research odyssey; contact was made because of my Web site. Because of the intermittent failure of my word processor, needed to have TMG create smaller files, not one gigantic journal file. TMG allows the user to create a file by generation which certainly results in smaller generated files for processing purposes. On the other hand, family, when reading the book don't care that much about generations as they are more concerned with identifying their "branch" of the family.

Decided to divide the book into chapters, a chapter (journal) for the first five generations and a chapter (journal) for each of the five branches.

Chapter 1 - Introduction
Chapter 2 - Journal of the first five generations
Chapter 3-7 - Journals for each of the five family branches

Family branches were not that equal (file sizes). The book contains some 423 pictures. One branch has 200 of them. So I ended with smaller files but two files continued to run into the wordprocessor program aborting situation. Sat on this for quite a few months not knowing what to do. Then discovered Wordperfect X3 Professional and purchased it. Had no idea if using this program would help but had to do something.

Now my operating environment is XP - Home, 1,048 memory and WordPerfect X3 Professional. Continue the file output to WordPerfect 5.1. The book resides in its own folder and the exhibits are defined as "images" meaning the generated WPD files stand on their own.

Am happy to say I have now created a draft version of the heritage book with a name index. The book is 400 pages, actually 398. The combined size of the WPD files is 742,567k. The process to create the book is not exactly straight forward. TMG creates the journal files in but a few minutes. It takes over two weeks of intensive manual post work to create the book. This work does not involve narrative flow as 99.9 percent of it has been taken care of in TMG by sentence manipulations.

The two weeks+ of post editing cannot be address within TMG, as the program is designed today.

Following are my post editing actions identified as most labor intensive to least labor intensive.

1. Editing the exhibit (photos):

a. Add the caption to the photo and frame it.

TMG supports image exhibit placement "centered" or the default, not centered. If centered, you can have TMG include the exhibit's caption. There are several problems here the first the captions themselves. The caption is not attached to the exhibit but is added as text beneath the exhibit which is also centered. see (b.).

b. Allow text to wrap

The second problem is the text does not wrap the exhibit. My image exhibits are 1.4 inches maximum height or width. Other exhibits could be from 2 inches to 5 inches. Lets just use the 1.4 inches. The reports are at 11 point. A photo of 1.4 inches high with caption (two lines) affixed to the photo requires 12 print lines. As the book contains 423 photos, these photos would require 5,076 lines to print. At 56 lines per page, this amounts to 90 pages just for the photos. To get back some of these 90 pages, for each picture, you need to go in and change the positioning to "paragraph" and identify if the photo is to be position left, center or right.

2. Bold names

While TMG supports the bolding of names, if you choose "font surname/name bolding", every name will be bolded with the exception of the names of childrens under the parent, they are not bolded. Why they are not bolded I have no idea. Take one family for example, mother, father, and five children. There are 36 instances of name bolding. What you want is the father's name bolded once, the mother's name bolded once and each of the childrens' names bolded once. In this case, seven names bolded. You have the choice of unbolding 29 names or bolding seven names, I choose to bold. The number of names correlates somewhat to the number of tags output, the more tags, the more names, the more bolding by the program.

3. Remove daughter of, son of

TMG supports the use of the "PAR" variable. I chose to use it in the primary birth sentence of an individual. This might generate the following sentence.

John Henry Doe, son of Matthew Doe and Maria Hartl, was born ...

This is fantastic as the lead in sentence for a person's narrative. But in the journal, the "son of" "daughter of" is also added to the children identified under the parent. A bit redundant so you go in and remove it from the childrens' entry.

4. Add a blank line before and after the family sentence.

Personal preference.

And two weeks+ later you have your book!!!. Then is time to generate a name index.

5. Generate a Name Index

In my case, there are six journal files needing to be combined in order to obtain a name index. Use the WordPerfect's document/subdocument feature and create a combined file from which you will generate the name index. Now the 423 exhibits come into play here to; WordPerfect v12 can't handle it but X3 seems to be able to. So as not to have the photos come into play, go into "view" and deselect "graphics. The photos will not be displayed although the area where the photos reside will be reserved so that the page format and page numbers will not change. Generate the name index.

What you do now is a bit important. In this file you want to retain only the name index portion not the chapter details. Do a copy of just the name index text, then deleted the file. Save the copied name index information into a new file. Add a heading, appropriate page numbers and margins and save the file. Do not "condense master" as the program will update your original files and they wil never be the same again. You now have your name index file for the book.

Looking at some surname entries, you will see where they may have enteries spanning one, two or more pages. To make it easier for the user, I add "surname cont'd" as the top line on each of these spanned pages. "surname" is the name of the surname that has its entries spanned over multiple pages.

That is it, you now have your book.

I don't wish to give the impression that WordPerfect X3 is perfect, quite the contrary. While X3 is better than version 12, it also has a problem of managing a file containing over 180 exhibits. While it can do so, you better plan on periodically saving say after 5 or 6 exhibit edits, as it tends to crash too.

6. Photo Clarity

When printing the book under WordPerfect Version 12, ran into an additional problem. In order to have the photos output in acceptable detail (clarity), needed to print them at 1200 dpi. Have a HP LaserJet 2100 printer which can output in real 1200 dpi. WordPerfect Version 12 caused the page to be reformatted shrinking the output about one line every 20 pages. Could not get the program to repeat the page formatting one printing to the next. Drove me bananas as you could not realistically generate a name index with text and pictures sliding at print time.

Have not run into this problem with WordPerfect X3.

7. Back References/Generations

Should you select name options "Generation Numbers" and "Back Reference Generations", which I do, you run into a bit of a problem as the generations numbers and the back references are incorrect in the individual branch journals. The journals always start with generation one but in my case they should start with generation six. So back references are short by five and generation numbers are short by five.

Could have gone through and manually corrected this but the numbers were just to many as in a thousand or more; three times the number of families.

Correcting the above 5 points are repetitive in nature and in my opinion could (should) be handled by the program (1,2,3,4,and 7).

As TMG now stands, the down side to all this is once you have created the book containing many exhibits, you are not going to do it again unless you want to spend another two+ weeks of your life editing. The same applies to creating individual branch journal reports for family distribution.