FTST-L Archives

Archiver > FTST > 2002-01 > 1010571423


From: nick <>
Subject: [FTST] Re: Any action on this site?
Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2002 10:17:03 +0000
References: <200201090402.g0942hL05143@lists2.rootsweb.com>


I do not think that the comparative infrequency of messages to this
group should lead people to yet feel that FTST is a finished and
complete project. Comments about the qualities of FTST depend to some
degree upon who might be using it.

FTST is clearly not fully integrated with TMG (& vice versa) nor yet
intended to be. There are potential facilities in FTST which cannot be
used until TMG itself is further developed (eg: the more detailed
breakdown of exhibit qualities in TMG (type of exhibit, photographer,
time period or date of image, content type and so on) which could then
lead to more flexible exhibit selection in FTST. (I know this is an
inaccurate portrayal as the two are likely to be merged into a single
TMG 5).

Similarly there appears to have been less attention paid to some
facilities in FTST which are already present in TMG, eg: the backup
routines. I find that the path for backups and researcher details are
regularly lost when I refresh my dataset in FTST, and the program does
not appear to be able to select the oldest backup file for
over-writing. Although these are irritations, the appropriate
programming already exists in TMG so will be applied in the final
integration I guess. However this might matter more to users who do not
use TMG.

There is a noticeable problem, for some people, in the time taken for
Slide Show Manager and the Exhibit Log to fire up. This appears to be
system-specific but on my desktop each of these sub-programs takes some
30secs to load up which is a long time subjectively. It is beginning to
look as if this problem is somehow associated with Hewlett Packard
printer installation but I do not know how many others have been
affected by this problem.

In the hour-glass report, only certain data lines are modifiable: the
'Descendants and female ancestors' and 'Spouses of descendants and male
ancestors' data types are not programmable and any settings that you
change are immediately lost (at least in my
program).

I also have the problem that in my descendancy reports one or two
images are not displayed, on screen (although they are visible when
viewed at different zoom levels to normal) or printed. As they do not
appear in the print preview or on the screen shot, this problem does not
look like a printer driver problem.

On a different note, I wonder if anyone knows how one might create a
kind of drop-line chart in FTST? I had hoped that one could just turn
off the boxes and centre align the text. Trying to do this led me to
realise that
a) it does not appear possible to save different versions of
descendancy chart configuration as you can in TMG,
b) it does not appear to be possible to turn off the box style (box
line thickness has to be greater than 0) and
c) there is no facility to align text within a box.

Has anyone had any better luck? I am sure it could be argued that FTST
is not designed for drop-line charts or that I could purchase or
download another program to make them, but I would prefer to achieve
most of my needs with the minimum number of programs if it is feasible.

Nick Shelley

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