Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Pedigree Charts using Family Tree Maker 2009

I posted earlier about making 8.5 x 11 pedigree charts using Legacy 7/Legacy Charting, and wanted to show some of my creations made using Family Tree Maker 2009.

FTM 2009 has many of the same charting capabilities as Legacy Charting - the user can choose the number of generations, the items to show, the format of the text, lines and boxes, and the background picture (either one of their stock backgrounds or a photograph from the user's collection).

With some time investment in navigation around the program (see my series on FTM 2008 - FTM 2009 is almost the same), creating "pretty" pedigree charts is fairly easy to do. The neat thing is that you can come back to them and add more detail or colors.

Here is a five-generation chart of my father's ancestry:



And a five-generation chart of my mother's ancestry:



Five generations was the most I could get on the page and still include the dates. I sacrificed the locations for a larger type font. I could have added locations by going to a smaller font size. The alternative is a larger full-scale chart - on more than one page. These one-page .jpg files are about 1.2 mb in size.

One problem I've run into is that FTM 2009 crashes when I try to save a three-generation descendants chart as a .jpg file. It's done it several times on me so far. Unfortunately, even though I thought I saved it as a chart, the saved chart was not found when I rebooted the program, so I had to create it again...and the FTM 2009 crash happened again. Has anyone else had this happen to them?

5 comments:

familytwigs said...

I like the Legacy ones better. But these are interesting. But it looks like they don't fit as well as Legacy either. I liked the way you could work with the frame in charting.

I just bought a new program.(I'm waiting for it to come in the mail) I wonder, do you like the new FTM? Enough for it to be your only program?
(I didn't get it this time!)

Cindy said...

Randy - this post got me curious so I tried to save a 3 generation des. chart in pdf format from FTM 2009 - it did take a moment for the program to do it, but then it came up and asked me if I wanted to open the file - looked fine in adobe. I've never used any other software program - thanks for the info on Legacy.

Eileen said...

How do you save a chart to .jpg in FTM2009? I was trying to duplicate your crash and I was able to save both the 5 generation pedigree chart and the 3 generation descendant chart but I could not figure out how to save it as .jpg? I did not see a Save As option in Publish. Is it something I can add to the toolbar in Publish?

Eileen

Randy Seaver said...

Sheri - I also like the Legacy charts better - I like boxes with different background colors.

I'm not enamored with the old or new FTM. I've used it for years, though, so am loathe to switch. I'm waiting for RootsMagic 4 to come out. I'll test it too and then make a decision. FTM 2009 will upgrade soon and I'll test it some more.

Cindy - it worked for me also to export to a PDF file.

Eileen - in the Publish screen there is a very small "Print" link and a small "Share" link in the upper right hand corner of the screen - above the Publish icons. If you click on "Share" you can then "Export to PDF" or "Export to Image." If you export to image, you can choose the file type, including .jpg.

All of these programs are very intricate, aren't they? :)

Anonymous said...

I had the same crash when trying to export a chart as an image - in the Applications Event Log there was a long error report summary and buried in that was a message similar to: Joseph "Joe" Blow.jpg is not a valid file name. I got rid of the quotation marks on the alias and it stopped crashing. It creates a file name based on the root person in the chart, so that name has to be a valid file name. No odd characters.

Hope this helps. FTM 2010 still has this bug.