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APPENDIX A REVISION HISTORY Over time, GIM has matured as the result of enhancements that we (the GIM authors) are adding from time to time, and as the result of correc- tions to problems that are reported to us by users of GIM. A list of enhancements and release dates is presented in reverse chronological order below: version 3.13 (January 7, 1996) Changes since the last version: One GIM user, after studying the GIM folder file format in detail, discovered and reported to us that a number of entries in the notes file were unused, but were not being reported by the Folder Check as orphan notes. As a result, these entries in the GIM folder notes disk file ("MADSEN.GN") were going to waste. This situation has been corrected. This means that users of earlier versions of GIM may find that this version's Folder Check will report a number of orphan notes. (These notes will be reported as having a "next link=0" and a "file ptr=0".) Users who encounter this situation can run the Fix Folder to safely correct this situation. Ancestral and Descendency Tables are now more configurable, using the "Styles" menu (press F3 to enter the Forms Area, then Shift-F1 to enter the Styles Area). Previously, these forms included each person's GIN number and date and place of birth/christening and death/burial. Now each of these items is selectable, and users can choose to include none, some, or all of this information. A correction was also made to these tables to prevent long lines from printing off the edge of the page and wrapping around to the beginning of the next line. GEDCOM files created by Roots III, Family Origins for Windows, and Family Ties had been sent to us, which GIM was not handling correctly. These files were using certain GEDCOM tags in ways that GIM was not expecting. Each of these situations has been corrected, so that GIM is now more compatible with each of these products. On the Person Edit screen, when any of a person's events (such as his or her death, for example) is highlighted, the F1 key can be used to bring up a notes edit window containing that event's source and research notes. Previously, the F1 key had no effect when a non-event field (such as surname) was highlighted. This has changed, so that the F1 key brings up the person's general/miscellaneous notes in that case. (Note that this is only true for the fields above the events. For the fields below the events -- parents and spouses -- the F1 key still has no effect, since it's unclear whose notes are being requested when those persons are highlighted.) A circumstance was discovered in which the Prune function was failing to complete, resulting in a pruned folder which consisted of persons which were not linked together as families. This situation has been corrected. Copyright dates have been changed to include 1996. version 3.12 (October 28, 1995) Changes since the last version: Brian has moved to sunny Southern California :-), and his postal address has been changed throughout the documentation and source code. A case was discovered in which Fix Folder was reporting that it was fixing a certain situation, but wasn't fixing it. This has been corrected. The GIM.PIF file is no longer being released as part of this distribution. A number of people were reporting compatibility difficulties with the settings which were provided. A couple of minor changes have been made to the text of certain displayed messages. version 3.11 (August 17, 1995) Changes since the last version: A "tree counting" function has been added to the Utilities Area. See chapter 15 for details. The "Quick Graft", an alternative method for grafting which bypasses the time-consuming automatic matching phase, has been added. See chapter 13 for details. GEDCOM imports are smarter about handling GEDCOM files which use source structure pointers. The previous mechanism for handling such things was painfully slow and awkward; it has been redesigned to be much more elegant. GEDCOM imports have been restructured to understand The Master Genealogist's GEDCOM files. TMG uses a superset of the legal structures which are defined in the GEDCOM standard, and so GIM was not able to recognize several of them. This has been corrected. GEDCOM imports now distinguish between "prefix" and "suffix" titles. A list of prefix titles is defined (and that list can be augmented), and everything else is treated like a suffix title. See chapter 14 for details. GIM LISTS WHERE commands which began with either "WHERE any lds note" or "WHERE any vital note" (such as "WHERE any vital note isn't missing") were causing a program error crash. This has been corrected. A CLOBBER command has been added to GIM LISTS. It controls the behavior of the GO command when a MAKE subcommand names a list which already exists. For details, see chapter 11, Part B of the documentation, or the GIM LISTS help command ("HELP CLOBBER"). An APPEND command has been added to GIM LISTS. It acts just like the FILE command, except that it appends to existing files rather than overwriting them. Fixes to the new Family Record form. Certain bugs relating to low (or no) EMS memory have been fixed. These include system hangs during the Fix Folder function, corrupted (i.e., invalid) free lists during the folder check, and incorrect responses to soundex name searches. version 3.10 (May 29, 1995) Changes since the last version: The internal mechanism for calculating soundexes has changed. This means that fuzzy name searches (i.e., looking for "Johann Adam Sauter" as "John Souter") are more likely to strike a match, but it also means that pre-3.10 soundexes will have to be recalculated. GIM will do this for you automatically the first time you open any pre-3.10 folder. It was pointed out that the title_info bar (that is, the titles and other periodic messages that appear on the left hand side of the top row of your screen if you are in novice mode; they don't appear in expert mode) went blank when the messages in that bar were a certain length. This bug has been fixed. GEDCOM Exports now display the number of persons and families in the exported GEDCOM file upon completion of the Export. GEDCOM 5.3, a not-yet-officially-released draft of the GEDCOM standard, defines a structure called a SCHEMA for use by software products which wish to define their own GEDCOM tags. It has recently come to our attention that the genealogy program Kith and Kin uses this feature to define tags for its own use. Prior to GIM version 3.10, GIM GEDCOM Imports would complain about the presence of the SCHEMA structure, because it wasn't programmed to handle them. This has been corrected, but in a shortsighted manner: apparently, Kith and Kin only intends those tags for its own use, and so GIM simply ignores them. This is going to come back to bite me later on, because theoretically, SCHEMAs can contain very significantly useful information. When and if it should ever happen that some other software product uses SCHEMAs and actually intends for me to interpret them, I'm going to have to redesign GIM's GEDCOM Import programming rather significantly; until then, I'm gambling that I won't have to do so for a while yet. GEDCOM Imports now interpret a NAME without slashes as a given name, rather than a surname. GEDCOM Imports now interpret multiple NAMEs for the same INDIvidual like ALIAses, storing them as alternate names in the general source notes. Previously, multiple NAMEs were handled incorrectly, resulting in the last of the series being taken as the only one, and all others discarded. Fixed a bug in GEDCOM Imports concerning indented lines. Fixed a bug, introduced in version 3.09, which involved the DISPLAY (PRINT, FILE) command, when applied to "All Persons", "All Families", or "All Notes". Fixed a bug in notes block reformatting, which prevented reformatted text from completely reaching the margins. version 3.09 (April 9, 1995) Changes since the last version: Added new form: Family Record. This form is an alternative for users that do not prefer the LDS Church's Family Group Record Form. Chapter 10 revised to include this form. Preferences added to the Forms Styles Area for this form. Individual forms move around on the Forms Menu. Forms Styles modified for 4- or 5-generation Pedigree Chart selection. The last section of Chapter 17, "Inside the Software Design of GIM" has been rewritten. If you're a Pascal programmer and a registered GIM user, read this section. Block reformatting in the Notes Editor was added to version 3.08 at the last minute, but no mention was made of it, here and in Chapter 9. Chapter 9 now includes a section on that block reformatting capability. When rearranging the sorting order of children on the Family Edit screen, the display of the children's information wasn't cleaning up properly as they moved, resulting in spurious text cluttering the screen. This has been fixed. A case was reported to us in which PAF's GIE program was used to create a GEDCOM file intended for Ancestral File, and then that GEDCOM file was imported into GIM. Of course, this is a misuse of PAF, since doing so creates GEDCOM structures which are specific to Ancestral File, and which have no meaning to any other software. However, despite this, GIM has been modified to quietly ignore those Ancestral-File-specific structures, just in case anyone ever tries to do this again. The "add parents" function, which was added in version 3.07 (see below), was not assigning GIN numbers to those newly created parents. This has been fixed. In version 3.08, we fixed a bug in the "add child" function, so that the new child's parents would appear on the new child's Person Edit screen. In doing so, we broke the part of the "add child" function which asks if you want to add a spouse to that child. This has all been fixed. Somehow -- we'd love to know how -- one GIM user managed to create a circular free list, which had the effect of causing the Optimize Folder utility to hang up forever. Optimize Folder has been changed to recognize and deal properly with this situation. It was pointed out that GIM LISTS misbehaves when GIM version 3 finds a .σσσ file which was created by GIM version 2. This has been fixed, by altering the format of the .σσσ file to include the GIM version number (309) as a "magic number". Unfortunately, this change means that version 3.09 will not recognize lists that were created by earlier versions -- whether version 2 or version 3.08 -- so any lists that you've been hanging on to will have to be reconstructed. While we were at it, all "σ" characters were changed to backquotes, because some people have correctly pointed out that the use of non-keyboard characters in those filenames makes them difficult to erase. version 3.08 (February 19, 1995) Changes since the last version: A great many two-byte integers, left over from GIM version 2, have been changed to four-byte integers. These were causing GIM to crash when certain functions were invoked on folders with more than 32,000 persons, families, notes, or dates. Automatic child sorting has been added to the Family Edit screen. It may be turned on or off, and is on by default. When off, children's sort order may be manually rearranged in the same manner that multiple spouses and multiple parents may be rearranged on the Person Edit screen. Added some more hacks to get around more Family Tree Maker GEDCOM inconsistencies. (See below, version 2.27.) The GIM LISTS operands PARENTS and PARENTSETS have been renamed NUMPARENTS and NUMPARENTSETS. The PARENTS operand now returns a person's parent's information, allowing for searches such as WHERE BIRTH DATE IS BEFORE PARENTS MARRIAGE DATE. The GIM LISTS operators STRING IS and STRING IS NOT were behaving in a case sensitive manner, whether CASESENS was ON or OFF. This bug has been fixed. When 'Q' was used to quit out of a DISPLAYed list, all subsequent PRINTs or FILEs of the same list were interrupted before they began. This has been fixed. GEDCOM Import now recognizes ASCII and ANSI as synonyms for the IBMPC character set. The (non-preprinted) Family Group Record form had been known to stretch out some of its pages, so that children on one page took up more vertical space than the children on another page. This has been corrected. It was pointed out that, when adding a new child, the names of the new child's parents don't appear on the new child's Person Edit screen. This has been corrected. In version 3.07, we added one of those press-any-key-to- acknowledge warnings to the notes editor, which was intended to notify you, in response to an F3-Join-Lines command, when two lines couldn't be joined because their combined lengths were too long. It was pointed out that this warning was also showing up during plain-old-ordinary-typing text insertion, and that this behavior was an annoyance. This other behavior was not intended, and has been corrected; the warning now only appears in response to an F3-Join-Lines command, as intended. version 3.07 (December 30, 1994) Changes since the last version: The "Generic_ASCII_Text" printer configuration will produce pure ASCII text output on the forms. This can be used to print to a file. When a file is specified as a printer device, if the file exists the forms output will be appended to it, otherwise the file will be created. Fixed a GIM LISTS bug that caused a crash when the WHERE command included either "AND NOT" or "OR NOT". Added "STARTS WITH" and "ENDS WITH" to the set of GIM LISTS operators for strings. Fixed a bug which caused GIM LISTS to crash when given certain nonsensical WHERE commands, such as WHERE 15 CONTAINS 7. The GIM LISTS continuation prompt, which had read "press any key to continue, or C for continuous printing" now also includes an option to press Q to quit. GEDCOM exports to GIM and Universal destinations are now no longer exactly the same: source and research notes are set apart by the identifiers "SOURCE NOTES" and "RESEARCH NOTES" for the Universal destination, and "GIM SOURCE NOTES" and "GIM RESEARCH NOTES" for the GIM destination. Formerly, the latter pair of identifiers was used for both destinations. When you create a person, and if (for some reason) you decide that you don't want to continue creating that person upon starting to do so, the Person Edit screen used to force you to assign a gender to that person, and GIM would create and store that person anyway. This has changed. Now, if a person is created, but no gender is assigned, GIM will query you about whether you meant to assign a gender and forgot, as opposed to never intending to create that person in the first place. Thus, if you leave the Person Edit screen without assigning a gender to a person, GIM will now allow you to do so (after querying you heavily to make sure that that's what you want to do), but will NOT SAVE the person that you started to create. An "add spouse" and an "add parents" function, which are analogous to the existing "add child" function, have been added to the Multi Area menu for function keys Shift-F4 and Shift-F5 (next to Shift-F3, where "add child" is). Two other functions had been in these locations, and have been moved: the "Merge Two Persons" function was moved from Shift-F4 to Control-F4, and the "Folder Notes" function was moved from Shift-F5 to Control-F5. Birth and death information for each person has been added to the ancestral and descendancy tables. version 3.06 (November 20, 1994) Changes since the last version: Fixed a bug in TempleReady GEDCOM Exports which caused all submitted names to go to the temple file instead of the family file. Added more corrections to the Fix Folder function. version 3.05 (November 7, 1994) Changes since the last version: Versions prior to this one had a limitation on the total number of lines of notes per folder of 32,000. Although the limit on persons was also 32,000, this limit on notes lines is typically reached long before the limit on persons is reached, which means that most users weren't able to put more than about eight or ten thousand people into a single folder. Enough people have brought this to our attention that it was decided that we ought to increase that limit, and several other limits, in order to make GIM available to people with very large folders. The limits which were changed are: Numbers of persons, families, notes and dates per folder are now over two billion. Number of marriages per person was 12, and is now 24. Number of children per family was 32, and is still 32. Number of pairs of parents per person was 6, and has been dropped to 4. (We couldn't think of any scenarios in which a person might want to have more than that, except in very theoretical terms. Most people only get adopted so many times, and their parents only remarry so often.) These changes to the numbers of things that are allowed make it necessary to convert the disk files which make up a folder from version 2.xx format to version 3.xx format. A folder conversion utility called GIMCVT3.EXE is included for this purpose. If you try to open a version 2.xx folder with GIM version 3.xx, GIM is smart enough to recognize that fact, and will perform the conversion for you, by invoking GIMCVT3.EXE. It is important, therefore, that you keep this executable with your other GIM executables, at least until you have converted all of the folders that you have been using. (Please note that it is NOT possible to convert a folder back from version 3.xx to version 2.xx. However, GIMCVT3.EXE will make a copy of your version 2.xx folder in a subdirectory called GIMVER2, so that you can go back to version 2 if you choose to do so.) Starting in version 2.30, there has been a TempleReady place- holder in the list of GEDCOM Export destinations, but we said that that destination had no effect, and it was not ready for use. This has now been completed, and GIM now creates Temple- Ready GEDCOM files. See chapter 14 of the GIM documentation for more details. The Prune function now includes an additional modifier. In addition to selecting parents, children, spouses, ancestors and so forth, you can also select "self", which marks only the highlighted person for pruning. "Self" has always been included by definition whenever any other option is chosen, but it was not possible previously to select and prune just a single person, if you should want to do so. The "self" modifier allows for this possibility. Other minor, almost trivial modifications, such as: an additional (and uncommon) GEDCOM structure is now recognized when doing GEDCOM Imports, and the default color scheme has been changed a little. versions 3.00 through 3.04 These were beta versions, and were never publicly or officially released. version 2.30 (July 19, 1994) Changes since the last version: When editing notes, if the cursor was positioned after the end of a line, and control-right-arrow was pressed, GIM would crash. This problem is corrected. GEDCOM exporting to PAF destinations no longer inserts commas in long place names. We believe that the old behavior was more of a hindrance than a help, as well as being somewhat confusing. Recently (version 2.27), support for the ANSEL character set was added to GEDCOM Import. Now, GIM also supports that character set for GEDCOM Export as well. In the past, GIM made assumptions about which character set was appropriate for each GEDCOM Export destination. Now, GEDCOM Export allows the user to select from among three character sets. This allows greater flexibility, but also requires the user to better understand the use of the various character sets. GEDCOM Export now provides a placeholder for TempleReady compatibility. Details are forthcoming. At the present time, the TempleReady destination has no effect, and SHOULD NOT BE USED until further notice. In the past, GEDCOM exporting to all destinations placed all notes for each person subordinate to that person. This had the effect of placing all incoming notes in a single note pool when the GEDCOM file was read back in. It also had the effect that marriage and family notes were duplicated, because they were placed in the GEDCOM file once for the family's husband, and once for its wife. However, several genealogical software programs have the ability to attach notes to events and to families; it is only sensible for GIM to accommodate such software by placing these notes with their respective events. GEDCOM exporting to both the GIM and Universal destinations now behaves in this manner. (Because PAF only has the one notes field per individual, GEDCOM exporting to the PAF destinations still has all the notes lumped together in one block.) Notes exported to PAF are no longer indented. GEDCOM Import also recognizes that when the line "GIM SOURCE NOTE:" or "GIM RESEARCH NOTE:" appears at the head of a note on a line by itself it marks the difference between GIM's source and research notes. This means that GIM can now export to a GIM destination and then import the same GEDCOM file while preserving the original note structure. (The use of "GIM SOURCE NOTE:" text as the method of distinguishing between source and research notes here may seem contrived; but is necessary because GEDCOM doesn't distinguish between different flavors of notes. Although GEDCOM has NOTE, SOUR TEXT, and the now obsolete COMM tags, these tags are used by various software packages to mean very different things. Moreover, some software packages make up tags like INFO and MEMO which are not compliant with the GEDCOM standard and hence are incompatible with other compliant programs. As a result of this lack of standardized usage, the GIM Authors feel that it would be counterproductive to add to the confusion by adding any non-standard meaning to any of these tags.) When the GEDCOM Import function encounters more than one GEDCOM note for a given GIM note (say, a birth source note), these multiple notes are now separated by blank lines. Further corrections were applied to the handling of slashes in names and titles in imported GEDCOM files. Earlier comments (see versions 2.29 and 2.27 below) about this subject reflected a misunderstanding about the proper use of these delimiters. The text of the copyright notice at the start of an exported GEDCOM file has been revised. The overall performance of Grafting has improved. Added a 5-generation Pedigree Chart to the Forms Area. Changed the defaults for graphics support. The default is to auto-detect Hercules, CGA, EGA, or VGA, but not to detect Super-VGA (SVGA). To activate SVGA, place "VESA" on the program command line or in the GIM environment variable. Several obsolete sections of the documentation and help text have been updated or rewritten, as necessary. version 2.29 (first part of May, 1994) Changes since the last version: Fixed another bug in GIM LISTS. When the WHERE command included a reference to a person's "SPOUSE" or "MARRIAGE" (instead of a qualified reference, like "ALL SPOUSES" or "FIRST SPOUSE" or "ANY MARRIAGE"), the program would crash. This has been fixed. Removed slashes, if any, from the TITL field in GEDCOM files. IBMPC is now the default, instead of ANSEL, if no character set is specified in a GEDCOM file. This change violates the GEDCOM standard in a minimal way, but it conforms more realistically to real life. version 2.28 (late April, 1994) Changes since the last version: A new module has been added to the Multi Area. Shift-F4 now activates an area that combines two persons into one person, for use when a person is duplicated in a folder. Garbage collection has been added to the Folder Check, to correct a problem of records appearing on the free list that don't belong there. The Folder Check now tests the integrity of the free list and then conditionally does a garbage collection search. The Graft Area now uses exact comparisons on names and places instead of similar spellings for discrepancy detection. The Fix Folder function now includes new fixes for a person's source and research notes, and for the clipboard. version 2.27 (March 9, 1994) Changes since the last version: When importing GEDCOM files, if the forward slash at the end of the surname wasn't also at the end of the entire name, the slash wasn't removed. This bug has been fixed. Added recognition of the ALIA tag to GEDCOM imports. Added some hacks to get around Family Tree Maker GEDCOM inconsistencies. GIM documentation now recognizes the 10/93 edition of the preprinted Family Group Record form. Added recognition of the ANSEL character set when importing GEDCOM files. Exported GEDCOM files still use the IBMPC character set, but the exported HEADer now includes a keyword to that effect. Added PARENTS and PARENTSETS keywords to GIM LISTS, making it possible to search for persons with given numbers of parents, and making it possible to ORDER lists by numbers of parents. When deleting a family, children with multiple parents are now handled correctly. The pedigree chart now follows traversal screen selections. Fixed a bug in GIM LISTS involving the PLUS and MINUS modifiers, which caused GIM to crash under certain conditions. It is now possible to run GIM from any directory on the system, not just from the directory where GIM resides. version 2.26 (February 7, 1994) Changes since the last version: Rearranged an internal global structure so as to free some space on the heap. Saved the selected child for the ten most recently visited families in the GIMVAR.AUX file. When using the C or S commands on the Multi Area's traversal screen to move from the selected person to his or her children or spouses (respectively), it was possible to cause a range check error if a very large value were used, such as "C1234". This bug has been fixed. Added recognition of the PAGE tag to the GFE Area, which fixes an incompatibility with Brother's Keeper GEDCOM files. Fixed a bug in GIM LISTS which caused a hang (actually an infinite loop) when ORDERing by AFN, REFN, or CODE. Added text file reading and writing in the notes area. Added page up/page down functionality to the drive, directory, and file selection screen. This selection screen is used in the Folder, GEDCOM, and Notes Areas. Fixed a bug, making it possible to delete the Code. Fixed a bug which assigned bad soundex codes to the spouses of children added with the F3 Add Child command on the Multi Area screen. Also added checks for bad soundex codes to the folder check, and fixes for this situation to the fix folder utility. Enhancements to prune and graft, making them more robust and easier to use, and also fixing a bug which reversed the meanings of the control-F2 and control-F3 keys when pruning. version 2.24 (December 22, 1993) Fixes several items that were reported since version 2.22 was released. Among them, this version: allows more control in the Prune Area over the selection of branches of genealogical trees to be split off, copied, or deleted. fixes problems with GEDCOM transfers in the GFE Area, including special cases involving: persons with more than one set of parents; the use of the new five-letter LDS temple codes; and the use of extra long notes lines. adds page numbers to the Ancestral and Descendancy Tables. allows print sessions to be aborted during printing. documents the use of command line arguments and environment variables. reflects Blaine's change of address. (Can I mention that he's getting married? :-) version 2.22 (November 17, 1993) Fixes several minor bugs that were reported since version 2.20 was released, including: a bug in the Descendancy Table in the Forms Area which prevented the descendants of a person with no spouses from appearing on that form. a bug in the non-preprinted Family Group Record form which prevented place names from taking up the full width of the page when the LDS ordinances were turned off. a bug in the preprinted Family Group Record form which failed to include family notes unless both a husband and wife was present in the family. a bug in GFE Import which arose when the user attempted to select "new folder/file" as the name of the GEDCOM file to import. a bug in GIM LISTS which caused GIM to crash if a list was sent to the printer when the printer was off or unavailable. Also provided several enhancements, including: an enhancement to the pedigree chart to remove given and surnames when they are integers. an enhancement to GIM LISTS to allow the ORDER command to sort in reverse order. an enhancement to GIM LISTS to allow SCRIPT commands to default to the .SCR extension. an enhancement to the GIMPRN.GIM file to allow subscript and superscript printing on a DeskJet 500. version 2.20 (September 10, 1993) First general public, non-beta release.