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Posted by Peter Chant on 01/07/06 21:18
Peter Fox wrote:
> Your analysis of technologies is reasonable. You have carefully listed
> the features of solutions... ...but where have you listed the features
> you'd like to see in the problem? Aha!
You are stating I should have asked a bigger question.
>
> Let me guess and we'll go from there:
> (1) Great Aunt Maude can be viewed using a web browser but 'wouldn't it
> be nice if there was a nicely produced printed version with all the
> story for presentation around the further arms of the family and those
> who prefer paper.
I am at the ztage where Aunt Maud (no actual Maud so far) can be viewed on
the browser. I list her parents, grandparents, spouse, siblings and
children. I've left grand-children for now to keep it simple. I can also
list places associated with her and give explantory text, including
headings and photos. Formatting for photos is a little poor so far as I
only store the photos at one resolution. I really ought to store them at a
higher resolution for producing copies and then use php, imagemagick or
whatever to reduce them to a sensible size for the screen.
> (2) As the work is new as stands it will go through a process of "you've
> left out..." and "That's not uncle Charlie but uncle Fred..." and so on.
>
I'm not missing many. I've got around 100 relations entered, going back as
far as my great-great-grandparents. Given that my family is generally long
lived and some at least don't rush into having children I'm back to the
1830s as the earlist dates of birth. I doubt if there is much interest in
going any earlier, as we have no photos or documentary evidence reaching
farther back than that.
Actually rather than untra-neat presentation I'm more into recording who's
who on various family photos and any significant points to note. The
family tree (ish, I'm working backwards) is useful to show me exactly what
relations my parents are talking about.
The information is more important, it would have been useful to do this
years back, before both my grandmothers had died. The presentation can be
tweaked any time.
> As it happens, to produce an 'heirloom quality' copy you will need to do
> word processing. Pages will get split badly, some will want to be
> landscape and there's the matter of an index. Also a book would not be
> just a catalogue of people one to a page etc but a family history where
> the narrative aspect doesn't fit too well with the snapshot model used
> by web pages.
>
I'm not sure if I'm going to go to the length of 'heirloom quality'. Just
reproducing photos in an album, having a document with a potted history and
a guide to who is in the photos would be very valuable.
Actually, it does raise the point, laser printed text on paper should last a
while, as should ugly laser printed halftoned photos. There is much debate
over the longevity of inkjet photos. Maybe I should produce the copies of
the photos on black and white photo-paper and use laser printed photos for
a key of who is who.
For indexing I could simply use sections and paragraph numbers as these are
independent of pages. I.e:
1. Introduction
2. Family trees (i.e. drawn somehow)
3. People
3.1 Tom
3.2 Dick
3.3 Harry
4. Locations
Fairly easy to do contents like this with a script.
> So _for a final-finished_ version you'll need a way to export your data
> to a word processor. Text or RTF would do the job. If you were to try
> direct to PDF you'd be forever fiddling with formatting. It is possible
> to stitch together PDF pages from different sorts into a whole but that
> costs £££ unless you have Adobe Acrobat (Writer) or Pagemaker installed
> already.
>
I note the words 'final finished'.
I don't think that PDF is a good format for anything but viewing/printing or
emailing formatted documents, for which I find it very useful.
I would like to crack how to embed photos in RTF as I failed to do this last
time I tried.
> But as you are not yet at the 'book of family history' stage can get a
> long way by the very simple expedient of a bit of CSS and a big report
> (web) page which then gets 'printed' to PDF for paper use. In this you
> want to be strict about the simplicity of your HTML then use CSS to
> tweak layout and prettyfication. This means that you have a way to
> create an up-to-date paper version as requests come in but not get
> involved with fixing everything in a word processed book.
I wonder if this imports the photos? I'm not sure if saving the page and
reloading it would work. However, I just tried a copy from Firefox pasted
into OpenOffice. That worked fine.
>
> BTW : The above is written from personal experience of a Family History
> project although no PHP or CSS was involved.
>
Cheers for your insight.
--
http://www.petezilla.co.uk
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