TextPlus Charts
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| TextPlus Charts | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | Implements the Text+ Ancestor & Descendant Charts. | |
| Validation | ||
| Mod Updated | 23 Sep 2023 | |
| Download link | v14.0.0.18
(See the Revision History) | |
| Download stats | ||
| Author(s) | Robin Richmond with translations by Ron Krzmarzick, Karsten Weikop, Bernard Wortelboer, Hendrik Martius, and Kåre Kjøllesdal. | |
| Homepage | TextPlus Charts (this page) | |
| Mod Support | My Mod Support form | |
| Contact Developer | My Mod Support form | |
| Latest Mod | 14.0.0.18 | |
| Min TNG V | 13.0 | |
| Max TNG V | 14.0.3 | |
| Files modified | This mod modified and installs numerous files. See the Installation section of this page | |
| Related Mods | ||
| Notes | Installs Czech, Danish Dutch, German, Norwegian, and Spanish translations. French translations require the TextPlus Charts-French mod | |
Purpose of the Mod
To define two new charts - the Text+ Ancestor Chart, and the Text+ Descendant Chart. Both charts follow a text format (basically an outline layout) but draw lines between parents and children. Links to these charts are placed on the TNG "Inner Menu" (the horizontal link menu just below the TNG Tab Bar) on the Person Profile and on Pedigree and Descendant chart pages. The Inner Menu on those pages already contains links to various Ancestor and Descendant charts.
Features of the Text+ Charts
- The Text+ Descendant Chart is similar to TNG's Text Descendant Chart, but has several additional features.
- The Text+ Pedigree Chart serves the same purpose as TNG's Text Ancestor Chart, but does not use the standard 4-generations-per-page Pedigree format. It can display at least 15 or so generations in one chart that is one page wide and several pages long. It also has some of the same 'additional features' as the Text plus Descendant Chart.
[Show Additional features]
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Both charts:
- Draw lines to connect people with their children.
- Display places of birth and death instead of just dates.
- Display charts display alternate birth date and/or place (i.e. christening date/place) when the birth date and/or place is missing.
- Display burial date and/or place when the death date and/or place is missing. (When the "location" component of a burial placeplace contains the word "Cemetery", the entire Cemetery name is removed from the placename.)
- Display the last known place of residence and the date of that residence event for people who are living (if security contraints allow it).
- Can display ALL of a person's descendants or ancestors rather than a specific number of generations,
- Display a summary at the bottom of the chart,
- Have mod options that control where, whether, and how to present dates, placenames, age, and marriage data.
- Have run-time options that control the size and spacing of the charts. Some parameters are available in the main window, and some parameters are available only in the Format for Printing window.
- Have run-time options that affect the information to be displayed in the chart. (See Mod Options below.
- Allow the user to save the size and spacing parameters to a cookie for use by subsequent charts.
[Hide Features]
Options and Settings
This mod has several types of settings, including
- Mod-specific configuration variables, which I ordinarily call "Mod Options".
- New choices for native selection box options at Admin>>Setup>>Chart Settings
- Run-time options in the TextPlus Chart programs that affect charts dynamically
- Persistent cookies that retain some of the run-time option settings.
Mod Options
There are about 10 settings (depending on how you count them) in the TextPlus Charts "Mod Settings Block" at Admin >> Setup >> Chart Settings >> Mod Settings Blocks
Option Choices
This mod adds a choice to each of two native selection boxes in the options form at Admin>>Setup>>Chart Settings:
- The option to select "Text+" has been added to the "Initial Display" field in the "Pedigree Chart" subform.
- Similarly, the option to select "Text+" has been added to the "Initial Display" field in the "Descendancy Chart" subform,
Run-time Options
These options are presented by the two Text+ Chart programs to change the charts dynamically, at, well, at run-time. The run-time options are illustrated and described in the Visualizations below, and are described with additional detail in the Text+ Charts help file.
Persistent Cookies
All users (not just Admins, and not just users with accounts) can save their preferred Text+ Print Formatting options (indentation, font size, page width, etc.) for use in subsequent charts. There are separate cookies for the Text+ Ancestor and Descendant charts.
Other Mods
Conflicts
No known conflicts with published mods. However, there is a conflict with older versions of an Add New Items mod that was written by Ian Fettes.
Related Mods
- The Mod Settings Blocks mod packages this mod's options into what I call a "Mod Settings Block", which is a set of form fields that formatted and labeled so that it stands out among other options in an Admin>>Setting form. Mod Settings Blocks is a prerequisite for this mod; it must be installed before this mod can be installed.
- An Inner Mod Menu, which provides handy links from TNG pages directly to mod documentation and a mod's Mods Settings Block. (Inner Mod Menus are visible only to TNG Admins; never to end users.)
- The Mods Used feature, which captures a list of mods that affected the code used to display a TNG page. (This is analogous to the Mod Manager Analyzer feature that reports which mods affect a given TNG file, but that applies at run-time.
- This mod coordinates with Count Descendants in two distinct ways.
- The Descendant Chart program's Inner Menu:
- The Text+ Descendancy Chart program installed by this mod contains a link to the Count Descendants chart that is visible only if [Count Descendants]] is installed.
- Similarly, the Count Descendants Chart installed by Count Descendants contains a link to the The Text+ Descendant Chart that is visible only if TextPlus Charts is installed.
- The Admin>>Setup>>Chart Settings form, where both mods add an option to the "Initial Display" selection box in the "Descendancy Chart" section of the Chart Settings form
- The Descendant Chart program's Inner Menu:
- This mod coordinates with Ancestor map in that the Inner Menus of the TextPlus Charts and Ancestor map programs contain links to each other, but those links are visible only if the relevant mod is installed.
Files Changed
- Modifies the inner menus of the other TNG chart programs by adding a link to the relevant Text+ chart.
- Descendant charts (descend.php, descendtext.php, desctracker.php, register.php).
- Pedigree charts (pedigree.php, pedigreetext.php, verticalchart.php, ahnentafel.php, extrastree.php).
- Also modifies descend.php and pedigree.php to allow the TextPlus charts to be treated as the default descendant and ancestor charts.
- Modifies the chart settings programs to add mod options (admin_pedconfig.php, admin_updatepedconfig.php).
- Modifies the English and Dutch cust_text.php files.
- The language strings used by the new Text+ charts and by the new mod options (in admin_pedconfig.php) are not added to cust_text.php files. Instead, they are defined in separate language files that remain in the mod subfolder.
- There are three Text+ help files, not all of which are translated into other languages. None of the help files are installed into working TNG folders. Instead, like the language strings, they remain in and are loaded from the mod subfolder.
- The only strings added to cust_text.php files are
- The string for the hyperlink labels in the Innermenus of the various chart programs. This string is defined only in English and in Dutch. All other languages just use the English string "Text+".
- In English only, there are two strings that are used as pointers to the files containing language strings and help text.
- Modifies tngrobots.php to add the new Text+ Charts to the list of programs (including all charts) that are flagged "Do not index" and "Do not crawl".
Installation
Files Modified
[See details ]
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- Modifies the inner menus of the other TNG chart programs by adding a link to the relevant Text+ chart.
- Descendant charts (descend.php, descendtext.php, desctracker.php, register.php).
- Pedigree charts (pedigree.php, pedigreetext.php, verticalchart.php, ahnentafel.php, extrastree.php).
- Also modifies descend.php and pedigree.php to allow the TextPlus charts to be treated as the default descendant and ancestor charts.
- Modifies the chart settings programs to add mod options (admin_pedconfig.php, admin_updatepedconfig.php).
- Modifies the English and Dutch cust_text.php files.
- The language strings used by the new Text+ charts and by the new mod options (in admin_pedconfig.php) are not added to cust_text.php files. Instead, they are defined in separate language files that remain in the mod subfolder.
- There are three Text+ help files, not all of which are translated into other languages. None of the help files are installed into working TNG folders. Instead, like the language strings, they remain in and are loaded from the mod subfolder.
- The only strings added to cust_text.php files are
- The string for the hyperlink labels in the Innermenus of the various chart programs. This string is defined only in English and in Dutch. All other languages just use the English string "Text+".
- In English only, there are two strings that are used as pointers to the files containing language strings and help text.
- Modifies tngrobots.php to add the new Text+ Charts to the list of programs (including all charts) that are flagged "Do not index" and "Do not crawl".
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Files Installed
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- PHP
- rrtextplus_descend.php - The TextPlus Descendant Chart
- rrtextplus_ancestor.php - The TextPlus Ancestor Chart
- rrtextplus_lib.php - A PHP function library used by both Text+ Chart programs
- rrtextplus_ancestor_tracker_ajx.php - An AJAX program that generates the new "Locate In Chart" popup for the Ancestor chart
- rrtextplus_descend_tracker_ajx.php - An AJAX program that generates the new "Locate In Chart" popup for the Ancestor chart
- rrtextplus_help.php> - A driver for the three TextPlus Chart help files
- Javascript and CSS
- js/rrtextplus_lib.js - A standalone Javascript library
- css/rrtextplus.css - A standalone CSS stylesheet.
- Image files - all containing small icons:
- img/rrtextplus_plus.gif - A white-on-black plus sign icon used in the TextPlus Descendant Chart as an icon for tree branches that have been compressed.
- img/rrtextplus_locate.gif - The 'locate person in chart' icon for the Text+Descendant Chart
- img/rrtextplus_top.png - The up-arrow "go to the top of the chart" link in the floating footer
- img/rrtextplus_down.gif - Light down-arrow that implies a pull-down menu
- img/rrtextplus_down_black.gif - Dark down-arrow for use in the b&w Format for Printing page
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Files Modified
[See details ]
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- Modifies the inner menus of the other TNG chart programs by adding a link to the relevant Text+ chart.
- Descendant charts (descend.php, descendtext.php, desctracker.php, register.php).
- Pedigree charts (pedigree.php, pedigreetext.php, verticalchart.php, ahnentafel.php, extrastree.php).
- Also modifies descend.php and pedigree.php to allow the TextPlus charts to be treated as the default descendant and ancestor charts.
- Modifies the chart settings programs to add mod options (admin_pedconfig.php, admin_updatepedconfig.php).
- Modifies the English and Dutch cust_text.php files.
- The language strings used by the new Text+ charts and by the new mod options (in admin_pedconfig.php) are not added to cust_text.php files. Instead, they are defined in separate language files that remain in the mod subfolder.
- There are three Text+ help files, not all of which are translated into other languages. None of the help files are installed into working TNG folders. Instead, like the language strings, they remain in and are loaded from the mod subfolder.
- The only strings added to cust_text.php files are
- The string for the hyperlink labels in the Innermenus of the various chart programs. This string is defined only in English and in Dutch. All other languages just use the English string "Text+".
- In English only, there are two strings that are used as pointers to the files containing language strings and help text.
- Modifies tngrobots.php to add the new Text+ Charts to the list of programs (including all charts) that are flagged "Do not index" and "Do not crawl".
[Hide details ]
Language Files
This mod does not add the language strings used by TextPlus Charts programs to conventional cust_text.php files. Instead, they are loaded directly from files named {language}_custtext.php in the languages subfolder within the mod subfolder. The mod's help files are also stored in the mod subfolder, and are not installed to the standard TNG "languages" folder. None of the languages whose translations are installed with this mod are translated into all of those languages.
Screen Clips
The TNG help files use screen clip image files, and separate screen clips can be defined for each language. But only French and English have the complete set of screen clips. English screen clips are used in place of missing screen clips.
French is the only language that has all three help files and all screen clips. The net file size of the French language strings, help text, and screen clips makes it necessary to install the French translations through the 'TextPlus Charts-French mod.
[Show Standard Installation Process]
Requirements
- A working TNG installation.
- An installed current version of the Mod Manager.
- You should backup files listed in the panel on the right.
Procedure
- Remove and delete previous version of this mod.
- Backup the files updated by this mod. They are listed in the panel at the upper right.
- Download the .zip file, Extract its .cfg file to the mods folder.
- Follow the normal automated installation for Mod Manager, as shown in the example Mod Manager - Installing Config Files.
Problems?
- Try using the Mod Manager Remove capability
- Contact me through My Mod Support form.
[Hide Details]
Visualizations
Some of these visualizations are marked up and annotated more thoroughly in the Text+ Charts help file, which can be found on the mod author's TNG site
| 1. Text+ Descendant Chart See also the 'Descendant Chart help file on the author's website. |
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| Overview of differences between the native Text Descendant Chart and the Text+ Descendant chart.
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[Close Text+ Descendant Chart Details]
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| 2. Text+ Descendant Chart in the Format for Printing window |
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[Close Text+Ancestor Chart Details]
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| 3. Text+ Ancestor Chart |
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The Text+ Ancestor Chart uses what might be called a "double outline" format in which:
In many ways, this layout is more like an outline-formatted Descendancy Chart(such as the Text+ Descendant Chart) than standard Pedigree Charts (or the TNG variants), which
As a result (especially when they contain more than 4 or 5 generations), Text+ Ancestor Charts have less whitespace than comparable Pedigree Charts and are much narrower and thus much easier to print, but tend to be a good bit longer. On the second line of the Text+ Ancestor Chart Inner Menu
As with the Text+ Descendant chart, the line wrapping is done by the program, not by the web browser. [Close Text+Ancestor Chart Details]
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4. Details of some features introduced with TextPlus Charts v16d These features are not necessarily visible in the screenshots above
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[Hide visualizations of recent changes]
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5. New features in TextPlus Charts v17 These features are not necessarily visible in the screenshots above
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Mod options can hide some of these features from end-users, so we don't have to worry about them being forced on end-users.
[Hide visualizations of recent changes]
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| 6. Full Text+ Chart Examples (from version 15 of the mod) saved as PDFs. The intent is to show you the chart contents, not the menu features of the programs. These charts do not all use the same chart settings or browser settings. And, of course, the size and shape of charts depends heavily on your data. That's generally not so true with classic Ancestor charts, but is definitely true with the Text+ Ancestor Chart.
(Note: In the Ancestor Chart PDFs, some of the lines and text are colored. I do not know why. The coloring seems to be an artifact of some browsers, at certain zoom levels.) |
| 7. Changes that the mod makes to the native "Initial Display" options for Ancestor (e.g.Pedigree) and Descendant charts, at Admin>>Setup>>Chart Settings |
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| This mod adds a "Text+" option to the "Initial Display" selection in both the "Pedigree Chart" and "Descendant Chart" sections of the options form. These options allow you to define the Text+ charts as your default Pedigree and/or Descendant charts. |
| 8. The Text+ Charts Mod Settings Block at Admin>>Setup>>Chart Settings |
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These options should be fairly self-explanatory, but it is worth noting that
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| 9. Margins and Line Wrapping Because the Text+ charts draw vertical lines connecting the parents and children, they cannot adjust the chart's left margin as generations are indented. In these charts, long lines of text that bump up against the browser window's right margin wrap all the way to the left margin, like this: |
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Thus, the Text+ Chart programs have to do their own wrapping. To wrap lines effectively, the programs need to know a target page width, which is supplied by an selection box on the Text+ Chart screen, in which the options are options "Mobile", "Portait", "Landscape", or "Legal" (meaning landscape orientation on legal paper.
With the appropriate settings, the chart excerpt above could look like this: where the red underline show where the program wrapped the data lines. Note that the lines were wrapped at logical breaks in the data. |
| 10. Formatting for Printing See the 'Printing help file on the author's website. |
Other mods that add labels to the descendant or ancestor innermenus can conditionally add the Text+ labels with code like this, which applies to the descendant innermenu.
#Include the Text+ Descendant chart hyperlink only if rrtextplus_descend.php is present.
#Pass it the generation count that this program used.
if (file_exists('rrtextplus_descend.php'))
$innermenu .= "<a href=\"rrtextplus_descend.php?personID=$personID&tree=$tree&generations=$generations\" class=\"lightlink\">{$text['tp-textplus']}</a> | \n";
Language Strings
This file has translations in Czech, Dutch, French, German, Norwegian, and Spanish. The French translations are installed through the TextPlus Charts-French mod, because there are French versions of the Ancestor Chart, Descendant Chart, and Print Formatting help pages.
Significantly, The TextPlus Charts language strings are not stored in standard TNG cust_text.php files, but rather in files named {language}_custtext.php in a folder named languages in the mod's standard subfolder. The TextPlus Charts help files are also stored in the mod subfolder's code>languages folder rather than the main TNG code>languages folder.
Read about why I handle language strings this way and about how to override the mod's language strings. [1].
Reducing Line-wrapping
The Text+ charts use unconventional presentations of dates and placenames to reduce the number of characters required to display a person's data, and thus to reduce the amount of line-wrapping required to print a chart:
- "Unknown" is displayed as "??", and, in some cases, omitted.
- If an individual was born and died in the same place, the placename is displayed only once followed by a semicolon and the birth and death dates, e.g.
Cleveland, Bradley, Tennessee, USA;15 Nov 1815 - 04 Jan 1887. - When both the date and place are unknown, nothing is printed (well, except when it is known that a person has died, in which case "??" is displayed).
- I also use an unpublished mod to create shorter alternate placenames of USA placenames (e.g. "Cleveland, Cuyahoga, OH" for "Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, USA". At present, this scheme depends on two other published mods: Placename Format and Burials-More Details. If you're interested in using short alternate placenames, let me know, and I'll share the mod with you.
Revision History
| Mod Version | TNG Versions | Date | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| v13.0.0.17b1 | 13-13.1 | 14Nov2021 | No functional changes. Changed two comments that happened to use a combination of characters that PHP8 no longer recognizes as comments!?! Specifically - End-of-line comments can be started with a single pound sign or by double slashes. Most programmers use double slashes. I use a single pound sign to make it easy to distinguish my comments from native TNG comments. But in PHP8, if a left bracket immediately follows a pound sign, the left bracket is seen as a invalid character, not as part of a comment. |
| v13.0.0.17b | 13-13.1 | 13Nov2021 | No functional changes for the end user. Cleaned up and annotated the mod options, added some language string translations. |
| v13.0.0.17a | 13 | 30Mar2021 | Minor changes and language updates
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| v13.0.0.17 | 13 | 20Sep2020 | Revision Notes [Show Details]
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| See earlier versions in the separate Wiki article TextPlus Charts pre-TNGv13 | |||
Sites using this mod
If you download and install this mod, please add your site to the table below.
| URL | User | Note | Mod-Version | TNG-Version | User-language |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| An example in Robin Richmond's Genealogy Database | Robin Richmond | Mod developer | 13.0.0.17b1 | 13.1 | EN |
| Families all over the world | Hans Weebers | public / private | 10.1.0.13 | 12.0.1 | NL,EN,DE,FR |
| Genealogy of the van Heerden Family | Emile van Heerden | Private site | 12.0.0.16beta3 | 12.1 | EN |
| Van der Maarel Genealogy | Edward van der Maarel | 12.0.0.15d | 12.0.2 | EN,NL | |
| Mitchell Families Online | Roger Mitchell | Another great tool for visitors, very well implemented! | 10.1.0.8 | 10.1.0 | EN |
| Turner mob | Margaret Grogan Turner | Another great tool for visitors, thanks! | 10.0.2.6 | 10.0.3 | EN |
| Hooley Family Links | Rick Hooley | Public/Private Site | See Here | See Here | EN |
| Wortelboer Genealogy | Bernard Wortelboer | Public site | 10.1.0.10b | 11.0.0 | NL,EN |
| Moss family tree | Chris Moss | Best text-based display. Public. | 10.1.0.12a | 11.1.2 | EN,DE,FR |
| Brady Family Tree in Western Australia | Darryl Brady | Public site | 10.1.0.12 | 11.0.1 | EN,DE |
| Roots & Relatives Remembered | Ron Krzmarzick | Public & Private | See here | See here | EN,DE,CS |
| Our Family Links | Chuck Filteau | Public site, modified Template 12 | 10.1.0.12 | 10.1.2 | EN |
| Racine d'Alsace | J-Louis Valory | Public (registration) | 13.0.0.17a | 13.0.3 | FR |
| Journeys in Genealogy | Patrick Thrush | Public WordPress/TNG bundle | 12.0.0.15e | 12.0.3 | EN |
| Our Family Histories | Bryan S. Larson | See Here | See Here | EN | |
| Familienforschung SCABELL | Helga Scabell | Public/Private | 12.0.0.15e | 13.0.1 | DE,EN,PT |
| Kleinmann Genealogy | John Kleinmann | Public/Private | 12.0.0.17b1 | 14.0 | EN |
| Our Acadian Family | Randal Suire | Public/Private Media (Very Useful) | 12.0.0.15e | 12.0.3 | EN,FR |
| Nielsen Hayden genealogy | Patrick Nielsen Hayden | Public site | 13.0.0.17 | 13.0.1 | EN |
| Our Roots&Relatives | Kåre Kjøllesdal | Private site | 13.0.0.17a | 13.1 | NO,EN |
| Kloosterman Genealogy Example of Text+ Mod | Cees Kloosterman | Public website | 13.0.0.17 | 13.0 | EN,DU |
| Huygens - Van de Moortel | Tom Huygens | Public/Private on WordPress | 13.0.0.17 | 13.1.2 | NL |
| Joseph Oran Holtz Genealogy Pages | Jim Holt | Private | See Here | See Here | EN |
Categories:
- Mods for TNG v13
- Mods for TNG v12
- Mods for TNG v11
- Mods for TNG v10
- Admin pedconfig.php mods
- Admin updatepedconfig.php mods
- Pedconfig help.php mods
- Descend.php mods
- Descendtext.php mods
- Desctracker.php mods
- Register.php mods
- Pedigree.php mods
- Pedigreetext.php mods
- Verticalchart.php mods
- Ahnentafel.php mods
- Extrastree.php mods
- Tngrobots.php mods
- Cust text.php English mods
- Cust text.php Dutch mods
