A Suggestion for Sharing FHS Family Information
Family History System
Reports Documenting Relatives of
John Fitzgerald KENNEDY
Menu.html Notepad.pdf Folder Contents Worksheet KENNEDY.zip
Some Explanation: This page describes a procedure I've begun using for sharing information from my FHS Family File with family members. Although I haven't been active in family research, I have managed to acquire information on almost 2500 persons (including 1370 of my relatives, over 1600 relatives of my granddaughters, and a number of inlaws).After getting very little response from sending out printed copies of reports, with a letter explaining them, I began trying to find a way of doing the same thing but sparing a few trees in the process. And, of course, the reports and presentation should be tailored for the person receiving the information. The result has been the procedure described here which provides reports in PDF format along with an HTML (web style) Menu providing links to the reports with a little explanation of each.
The Example: I have used an old FHS Family File with information about the KENNEDY family to create this sample collection. You can see how the reports are presented by clicking on the "Menu.html" item above. It includes 26 different reports and charts of various styles, including a 28 page "Register" style "booklet" with "Indexes" giving the page and line number for each individual in that register report. All relationships in the reports and charts are relative to the "Subject" of the collection, John F. Kennedy.
Best of all, creating a collection for someone else requires minimal change to the HTML Menu and, after becoming familiar with the process, the reports can usually be produced in less than an hour...without the sacrifice of any trees.
Changing the Menu: The HTML Menu file is really just a plain text file, though some text editors (and word processors) recognise the meaning of the internal "codes" and do not present the file as "plain text", making editing a bit difficult. Click on the "Notepad.pdf" item above to see a listing of the HTML Menu used in this process as it appears when printed by "Notepad", the Windows plain text editor. The only changes required for a different "Subject" are the person's Name (on line 10) and the paragraph beginning with line 12. Both can be easily changed with Notepad and saved back into the HTML file. (You would also want to change, once, the contact information at the very end of the file.)
Report File Names: You should use the same names for the reports as have been used in the supplied Menu...or adjust them as you would like, but keeping the same name for the reports avoids having to change the MENU. Click on the "Folder Contents" item above to see a list of the file names used in the supplied MENU. You should make sure to observe the Case of letters in file names, as Upper/Lower case for the names of the report files must be the same as in the Menu. (Some browsers/environments do distinguish beteen Upper and Lower case letters in the names of files.)
Report Worksheet: The "Worksheet" item above provides a PDF copy of a spreadsheet that I use when creating a set of reports. It has some suggestions for report characteristics (Portrait/Landscape, font size) that may be required for some reports, and some report options that should be selected. I normally "Print to" FILE when creating the reports (the name of the output file is not important as it is a plain text file, not the type file you will use for sending out), then use the "View" option to see what the report looks like. The number of Lines, Pages and report file size are shown on the bottom line of the FHS Report Viewing area.
Creating PDF Report Files: When I first started on this, I "Printed" the reports to text files as described above, then used a word processor (I use "Open Office") to properly format the file, adjusting page, margin and font sizes, and then "Export"ed the document to a PDF file using an option of the word processor. This was a "painful" process that usually took a half day to create a set of reports.
I began looking into providing an option in FHSWIN to print directly to a PDF file, but then "discovered" a class of software (PDF Printer Driver) that serves the purpose. There are several out there, including CutePDF Writer, doPDF and NOVAPDF. (Most of the KENNEDY reports were created using doPDF.) After installing the driver software, and making it the Default Printer in Windows (so that FHSWIN will pick it up as its "Printer" destination), it is very easy to create PDF format reports simply by printing the reports to the PRINTER destination and choosing the location of the output file.
Make it Your Own - It is very likely that my choice of reports to include may not be the ones you would choose, so feel free to create a menu and set of reports that will fill your need. I just hope that this procedure proves to be a useful model for you.
That about covers the process. The "KENNEDY.zip" item above allows you to download a zip file containing a folder with the HTML Menu and Report files used here. You have to extract (drag) the KENNEDY folder from the zip file to use the Menu though. The links within the Menu file won't work inside a Zip file.
One more suggestion, when creating a new folder of reports, it is good to intially "fill it" with a set of appropriately named reports to provide "target" files to overlay with the PDF files that you will be creating (so that you don't have to type in the name of the file when you save it). These KENNEDY reports could serve that purpose.
A final note...all of the items at the top of this page are in the FHSWIN-HELP folder that you may have already placed in your FHSW2018 program folder.
