Thursday, August 20, 2015

Printing Pages From the "New" Ancestry.com Member Trees

One of the longstanding issues for Ancestry.com Member Trees was printing the LifeStory or Facts pages.  Ancestry.com announced on 7 August that this was now fixed in The New Ancestry: August 7th Feature Update on the Ancestry.com Blog:


The description of the Print feature says:

"Printing in LifeStory and Facts view – The print image is now formatted to fit the page while still reflecting the layout and benefits of the LifeStory and Facts view as well as removing the dark backgrounds to reduce unnecessary use of ink for printing. We will also be working on printing for MyCanvas publishing options."

1)  I wanted to try this out, so I went to a Profile of my 3rd great-grandfather, James Richman (1821-1912) and opened the LifeStory and checked out all of the buttons and links I could find:


There was no "Print" button in Tools or Edit or anywhere.  Frustrated, I went to the Browser controls in the upper right-hand corner of the screen above, the list of Browser Commands opened, and I clicked "Print."

2)  That worked!  Silly me - I thought there would be something on the Ancestry.com created page.  My Print dialog page opened, and it said there were 9 pages for the LifeStory page.  Here's the top of the LifeStory:


I saved the LifeStory to a PDF file (Ancestry named it "James Richman - LifeStory.pdf" for me).  I opened it in my PDF Reader, scrolled down to the last page and saw:


The documents that I attached are readable on the nine pages, which is encouraging.

3)  I did the same process with the "Facts" page.  Here is the "Print" screen for the top of the "Facts" page:


The three columns, for Facts, Sources and Family are a bit squished together, and take 7 pages.  I saved the "Facts" to PDF (Ancestry named it "James Richman - Facts.pdf" for me) and opened the PDF:


I changed the Print to Landscape and I think it looks better on 8 landscape pages:


4)  I also looked at Printing the Pedigree Chart using the Browser "Print" button in Landscape mode:


That doesn't look so good, does it?

And the Family View Chart Print doesn't look so good either:


To be fair, Ancestry didn't say they would look good.

So all of that works, and the Printed LifeStory and Facts pages look pretty good, although the font size is pretty big and it takes many pages to include everything for profiles with many Facts and relationships.  

5) A user could try to save these pages to a PDF using a tool like the Print-Friendly & PDF program or as an Evernote Note.  Those don't work so well, at least for me!

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/08/printing-pages-from-new-ancestrycom.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.




4 comments:

T said...

It makes one wonder why all of these Wonderful improvements ancestry made have given every blog I read a new work around subject every day. As always, if ancestry had real genealogists working on their programs, the programs would work. But then, that would be the end of work around blogs.

kinfolknews said...

There is an actual print button for the Pedigree chart and Family View. Works great.

Regina :)

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