Nicholas Spalding spalding@iol.ie has graciously given me permission to include his program GEDCAP3 on my web site. Among other features, GEDCAP3 offers a way to convert capitalized surnames to mixed case, with special handling for atypical names such as O'Leary and FitzSimmons.
GEDWRAP and PAF3WRAP
These programs may be obsolete with the advent of PAF 4.0 for Windows in June of 1999. See the notes below for further discussion.
Early GEDCOM files code notes with a hard return for each line. Newer GEDCOM files and genealogy programs are more flexible. They can handle soft returns, wrapping a paragraph to fit in a small window displayed on the screen or expanding it to fill the width of a page on a printout with a small font.
The transition from old to new is not an easy task. All PAF 3.0 users will face this dilemma immediately, but it is not unique to PAF -- the situation arises when importing any GEDCOM file before version 5+ into any program which employs soft returns in notes.
If the original notes with hard returns look like this:
+------------------------------------------------+
|This is a paragraph which will have two lines in|
|it. |
| |
|Now I am starting a new paragraph. It will also |
|have two lines in it. |
+------------------------------------------------+
then the notes after conversion may look like this:
+------------------------------------------+
|This is a paragraph which will have two |
|lines in |
|it. |
| |
|Now I am starting a new paragraph. It will|
|also |
|have two lines in it. |
+------------------------------------------+
This is not a pretty sight. GEDWRAP aims to improve word wrap in notes. It was specifically designed as an alternative to the direct conversion of PAF 2.31 databases by PAF 3.0.
Please note that it will NOT work on GEDCOM files created from a PAF 3.0 database; it will only work for the initial conversion. However, GEDWRAP may be useful when importing GEDCOM files created by an old genealogy program into newer programs using GEDCOM 5.5 standards.
NEW Jan 9, 1998
After a number of requests, I have written PAF3WRAP, which will modify the notes in a GEDCOM file created by PAF 3.0. The beta version of PAF3WRAP is included in GEDWRAP.ZIP. Please read all the documentation files in the package to understand the issues. PAF3WRAP will make some radical changes in some styles of notes. It works best for ordinary paragraphs aligned to the left margin and for lists with short lines.
Warning! Blocks of text which have been indented still present a problem, no matter what method is used. Please consult the documentation, which explains the difference between indented lists and indented paragraphs. GEDWRAP will not modify any indented lines; PAF3WRAP will eliminate the indents in paragraphs but not in lists.
Click here to retrieve GEDWRAP (about 96K bytes with PAF3WRAP included) as a ZIP file. If you experience any difficulty during the download, please try again at a different time of day. AOL tells me that high traffic on the site can cause mysterious error messages.
GEDWRAP.ZIP contains a documentation file GEDWRAP.DOC, a plain ASCII text file which is best printed out with the DOS PRINT command. A monospaced font is necessary to make columns line up correctly. Windows 95 users can substitute the DOS command "TYPE GEDWRAP.DOC > PRN". The file uses "box" characters to simulate space on a screen. If your printer cannot handle box characters, other cosmetically inferior characters will be substituted. The file GEDWRAP.DOK uses the + | and - characters to make boxes, as in the short example above.
I will fill mail orders for a $4.00 shipping/handling fee. My address is 418 Gilbert Avenue, Menlo Park CA 94025. The most current version will always be available at this site. The ZIP file will always be named GEDWRAP.ZIP. The current version 1.0 contains
README.TXT 24 May 1997 how to print the documentation file
GEDWRAP.DOC 10 Jan 1998 the documentation with box characters
GEDWRAP.DOK 10 Jan 1998 the documentation without the boxes
GEDWRAP.EXE 17 Jul 1997 the program
GEDWRAP.CFG 11 May 1997 the configuration file
GEDWRAP.GED 11 May 1997 the sample GEDCOM for testing
PAF3WRAP.EXE 9 Jan 1998 an alternative for PAF 3.0 GEDCOM files
PAF3WRAP.DOC 14 Jan 1998 brief documentation: read GEDWRAP.DOC also
PAF 4.0 does a better job of converting notes in a PAF 2.31 database than PAF 3.0 did. I'm still checking out various styles of notes, but it looks like most paragraphs are wrapped correctly.
PAF 4.0 leaves indented text alone. GEDWRAP also leaves indented lines alone.
PAF 4.0 leaves lists alone if the line length is less than 50 characters. GEDWRAP uses a different method for deciding if text is a list: if the first word in a line could have fit on the previous line, it assumes that a hard return was intended. Thus GEDWRAP will leave more lists alone and should be used if you have lists with lines longer than 50 characters (addresses or census entries, for example).
PAF 4.0 will not change word wrap from PAF 3.0 files -- it retains whatever combination of hard returns and soft returns was present in PAF 3.0. Notes that came from PAF 2.31 into PAF 3.0 will have hard returns unless GEDWRAP was used.
PAF3WRAP removes hanging indents, since they just don't
work very well in PAF 3.0 (or PAF 4.0 either.) Hanging
indents which look OK on the data entry screen end up
with white space in the middle of the paragraph on
printouts, as illustrated in the next paragraph.
PAF3WRAP removes hanging indents, since they just don't work very
well in PAF 3.0 (or PAF 4.0 either.) Hanging indents which look
OK on the data entry screen end up with white space in the middle
of the paragraph on printouts, as illustrated in this paragraph.
If you want to get rid of hanging indents (and many people have stayed with PAF 2.31 because they like the looks of hanging indents), then make a GEDCOM file of your PAF 3.0 data and run PAF3WRAP on it, then import the revised GEDCOM into PAF 4.0.
It is somewhat difficult to predict what will give the most satisfactory results for your style of notes. My best advice is to experiment with several methods before doing a lot of new work in a database.
Any questions? Click here to send e-mail to APTurner@AOL.COM. And please feel free to visit Ann Turner's PAF utilities page.
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