On 7/26/2011 12:02 PM, Mike Hamilton wrote:
Hi all,
To me, the great advantage of the GEDCOM format is that every program can
(or should) read and export it. Although the format may have long passed its
use-by
date, it still remains the lingua franca.
I would much rather initially receive a plain vanilla, *valid* GEDCOM from a
newly found umpteenth cousin than a file in some weird and wonderful
proprietary format. Bells and whistles are all very nice, but the conversion
effort required is often painful.
Ron writes "if there is any compilation of what extras you'd like GEDCOM to
include, tell me."
OK: my wish would be for validate() to perform a very picky and fussy
"lint". As the docs say of validate(), "this performs a number of
consistency checks, but could do even more".
The best GEDCOM validator I know of is Tim Forsythe's VGed 3.02 (see
http://ancestorsnow.blogspot.com/2011/07/vged.html).
- Mike
There was a program LifeLines, which still seems to be hanging around on
source forge, that had the ability to write reports, see:
ftp://ftp.cac.psu.edu/pub/genealogy/lines/reports/INDEX.html
There were some very good reports that analyzed the GEDCOM data and
reported strange things like name mismatches, births after a parent died
or when the parents were too young are some examples I can remember of
the top of my head.
I believe there is a convertor or interpreter that will allow these to
run perl-gedcom.
I really like this fundamental idea of creating your own sanity checks
and/or adding them to an existing set of checks.
I don't remember the details of this but it should be easy to find again
if you are interested. Its been a few (more than a few?) years since I
have had time to work on my genealogy, but I hope to again in the near
future.
-Steve
