GedText gets text from GEDCOM. Geddit?
In early December, Rob Hemmings announced a new version of GedText, his application that extracts information from GEDCOM files, and presents it as text in a more human-friendly format, or as a DDF file for use with EasiWriter and Techwriter, Impression or Ovation Pro.
GEDCOM, which is short for GEnealogical Data COMmunication, is a file format for exchanging data between different genealogical software packages. Genealogy, of course, is the popular pastime of tracing ancestry and family trees and histories. The files themselves are textual in nature, though whether they can be considered human-readable (where the human is able to make sensible use of what’s read) depends on the human doing the reading, as the examples presented here – and the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images on the GedText web page – demonstrate.
GedText was originally written to work with the files generated by the Family application on RISC OS, an application originally developed by Denis Howe at Imperial College and subsequently updated by Pennine Software, but since GEDCOM is a standard file format, it should work with such a file produced by many family history applications, though not necessarily fully; where a GEDCOM record type is not recognised by GedText it will be shown in its “raw” form.
Version 1.14 of GedText includes the following changes:
- When outputting a DDF file, GedText now has the ability to define a separate style of “Surname” for the surname.
- If surrounding slash characters are present in the GEDCOM file, they are now removed from all surnames when outputting to DDF, and from all relatives surnames when outputting to text.
- A bug has been fixed whereby a SOURce reference record with not subordinate records could cause a crash.
Rob says that “GedText is freeware but if you find it useful it would be nice if you could let me know. Suggestions for future changes are also welcome and may even get implemented – depending on available time!” – a contact email address can be found on the web page for GedText and in the application’s Help file.
