Ftree Documentation

Documentation for FTree is still a little thinner than I'd like, but thats partly because no-one nags much. However the manual is improving and there is a quick reference man page with basic command line and config file information in it. There is a set of Release Notes for this version. There are also some FAQ below.

The current problems list gives information about some known issues with the current release.

FTree supports many gedcom tags, but not all of them. The current list of those supported can be found in the current supported tag list. For further information about GEDCOM see the GEDCOM section below.

Frequently asked questions

FTree Usage

• How do I select people in the tree? There are loads of ways. Here are some; if you know the persons ID, type their ID into an ID box and hit return, else use the mouse to drag the canvas around and then click on them on the canvas (middle button by default, but check the manual for mouse button configuration to change which button) or navigate to them using the various "display" buttons or finally use the edit->find pop-up.
• How do I marry two people that are already in the tree? The MOVE tab is your friend for all these sorts of operations. It lets you easilly select people and marry them or add a spouse to a family or move children into and out of families. See the manual for more information.

FTree Managment and Issues

• Is FTree available on other platforms? FTree is mainly targeted at Linux on x86 systems. The static linked versions should work on most Linux systems with a 2.0 or later kernel..
  I am also able to build versions on SGI IRIX and possibly NetBSD. I have also had reports in the past that it works using the iBCS compatability tools on some other intel *nix platforms.
  I have no special plans to support other platforms, but would attempt builds if I had access to the hardware.
• Is the source code available for FTree No, not at present. The point of FTree is to help people on Linux that want to do Genealogy, so at the moment I haven't released the source since most of the people that use it are not programmers and in general are interested in using it to do genealogy and not interested in fiddling with it.
  There are also other factors; firstly that my day job involves software management, thats what I do to pay the bills. For me FTree is a bit of light relief, cos I actually like writing code and don't always want the aggravation of managing other people having all the fun.. Siting on a 12 hour flight from London to Shanghai, I'd rather work on FTree than read the newspaper or do a crossword. Secondly I don't have the bandwidth spare to manage the project and that would really quickly start to frustrate people with good ideas.
  I may well release it in the future if I decide that I'm not going to do any more development. I'm not convinced there are many actual users of FTree that really would make much use of the source and the people that seem to be interested, seem to want it for reasons that may be important to them, but are not particularly interesting or important to me.
  I'd also note that the source is not very well structured or documented and would be hard for others to work with which also makes me a little reticent to release it publically. I started work on FTree around 1992, before I knew about either Linux or GEDCOM, it has evolved a long way since then.

  Summary: I write and support FTree for entirely selfish reasons and then release it to the wider community because there are a few people out there who find it useful.. Simple really ;-)

• Is FTree free Yes, I think so;

  You can download it and use it on as many PCs as you like without paying any money. I provide it in the hope that it will be useful to you and others. There are no 'trial' versions or lockouts built in, and it uses open, standard, human readable file formats so you won't even get your data locked away.

  However thare are a few caveats, free is an often misunderstood word, and in reality nothing is ever totally free, so let me try to be clear what I mean.

  I released FTree because I thought it might be useful. Provided you don't mis-represent its origins, or try to use it in any commercial way, I'm pleased for you to use it. See the Copyright statement. If you want to do something commercial - please contact me.

  If you pass it on, you must not take any credit for it. I hold copyright and you must acknowledge that.

  You are responsible for what you do with it. ie one of ways it is not "free" is that in using it is you accept that responsibility.

  Specifically, FTree comes with no guarantees. Its a best effort tool. You should always keep your data backed up. Though I don't know of any cases where FTree has trashed anyones data, due to the huge diversity of systems it runs on and data sources people have, I can't guarantee that it wont loose things in your tree, or that a save won't fail or whatever. Again, you are responsible.

  At the moment it is not "free" in the FSF sense - you can't get the source code or change it.

• If I find a bug, what should I do Please send me bug reports.. Most minor bugs I fix fairly quickly and they appear in the next release. If the bug is major or is causing you a lot of trouble I'll try to do a quick release or make you a special interim-release. An example GEDCOM file that demonstrates the problem will usually make it easier for me to fix the problem..
• What about new features I'm always interested to hear ideas for new features, so send them in. I won't promise to implement them, but I will think about them.. If I really like the idea I'll probably do it quicker and if I agree its a useful fix/enhancement I'll add it to my TODO list.
• Is FTree available in any other languages Sorry, not at the moment. I have given it some thought but its a fair bit of work, and currently not high on the TODO list. The answer is to allow user redefinition of all the fixed text strings. This has lots of good benefits. I appreciate that some may find the use of terminology like "christian name" difficult, but these days, (at least in the UK) these things have near-zero religious significance to most of us. Sorry if thats a problem.
  There is some support for other character sets and fonts, though its limited to latin derived ones really. There is also some limited support for handling GEDCOM ANSEL.
• What is ANSEL and how well supported is it ANSEL is a character mapping included in the GEDCOM spec to allow many special characters to be stored. ANSEL seems to be mainly based on latin-1 and latin-2 sets. The fact that it has bits from both makes it problematic. (any insight into how to handle this in X would be appreciated)
  I have started to add the beginnings of ANSEL read support. What I really need is someone who needs it to talk to me, send me some examples and do some testing.. FTree is normally fairly 8-bit clean on text fields, so normally data will be preserved. Setting "ansel_mode=convert" in the .ftree file will make an attempt to convert ANSEL to Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1). This is only implemented for a small subset of GEDCOM tags at the moment. Generally FTree displays text using the default X fonts, which are Latin-1 on my system.
• How compatible is FTree FTree writes fairly clean GEDCOM. However GEDCOM is very flexible which makes reading harder. There are also some other programs out there that actually deviate slightly from the GEDCOM spec. I have data files from the following packages and these basically work OK

  Application	Versions
  Lifelines	LIFELINES 3.0.2
  Family Tree Maker for Windows	FTW 4.0, 6.0, 9.0
  Family Origins(R) for Windows	FamilyOrigins 6.0
  Personal Ancestral File	PAF 4.0.4.18, 5.1.12.0
  Brothers Keeper	BROSKEEP 5.2 WINDOWS, 6.0 WINDOW
  GeneWeb	gwb2ged 2.07
  Family Tree for Java	FAMILY_TREE_FOR_JAVA 0.0.8
  Visual Genealogie	VISUGENE 2000.02.28
  Scion Genealogist	SCION_AMIGA 5.08

  We do fail to handle some of the more esoteric output from FTW (stuff I can't cope with is logged and ignored). There is some special code to cope with some of the strangeness of Brothers Keeper 5.2. There are some new things added in Brothers Keeper 6 which I've not fully done yet. Local (non GEDCOM) tags are not particularly well handled.

  I'm always happy to receive medium to large GEDCOM exports from other packages. They help my testing.

• How many people are using FTree Thats a good question. Quite a lot of people have emailed me over the years with questions and encouragement. I'd guess there are probably hundreds of people that are using it, but thats just a guess, it could be many more. I guess lots of people don't actually mail me.
• Will FTree support XML Almost certainly at some point. I don't have a pressing need, nor am I aware of anyone using FTree with a pressing need. It is under review. I'm a little bothered by the plethora of different proposals at the moment and haven't had time to work out where I want to go. Rest assured that if GEDCOM ceases to be that standard means of data interchange, FTree will move to support another format. Anyone who was using FTree in the mid '90s will know that we have shifted once already to get to GEDCOM.
• Is there going to be a GTK version of FTree Unlikely. I would like better font and language handling, but I don't have (or forsee having) the time or resource to re-write under GTK.

As always, I would really appreciate feedback on what system/config you have and whether FTree works OK or any major bugs you find. Please send reports/questions about ftree to me

The more people that give me feedback (just a quick email to say you loaded it and it works will do!) then the more likely I am to work harder at adding features, fixing problems and making releases..

The other benefit of telling me you are using it is I'll add you to my list of people I tell about new releases. Note: I will not release your email address to anyone else - period. I probably loath SPAM a lot more than you. FTree moves forward often when I get a specific request/idea and have a window of time to do some development. These are "development" builds and not posted on the web normally. If you want the bleeding edge version, let me know, but remember it is less well tested (though it is what I'm using).

There is still a lot of things that I would love to clean up and fix and there are bound to be some bugs in there somewhere.

GEDCOM

• Word Perfect 5.1, original (zipped)
• Envoy self viewing version, original (MS .EXE, zipped)
• HTML version, converted from WP5.1 version

The master copies should be at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gedcom ftp site

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