Personal Ancestry Writer II (PAWriter II) version 67 (Dated: 1 March 2007) was released yesterday.
It’s a free Mac genealogy application being developed by Howard Metcalfe. It’s been designed to have many of the same features found in the original Personal Ancestry File (PAG) application for MacOS (Classic). There are versions for both Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. This is a fairly major update to PAWriter II.
Changes/Updates:
* General notes are now treated as private notes when Exporting a GEDCOM for Another Program, and are no longer included in such GEDCOMs. Other programs may not properlly process multiple notes in this context since only one such note is allowed in the GEDCOM standard, and such notes may contain your own personal “to do” list, “have done” list and other status information in multiple notes.
* Multiple unseparated carets in a footnote reference are now recognized as referencing sequential footnote numbers. For example, PAWriter will replace the footnote reerences “^^^” in “John was born in 1747.^^^” with, say, the superscripts “4, 5, 6”.
* Checking the preference labeled “Use Ibid in footnotes when written” (to tell PAWriter to use Ibid in footnote citations when referencing the previous footnote citation) is meaningful only when the previous footnote contains just one citation which follows the footnote number. For example, (using a lowercase t to represent the dagger character,) the footnote “~t{Dedham}, p. 25.” followed by the footnote “~t{Dedham}, p. 36.” will replace the second footnote with “~tIbid., p. 36.”
* Recognition of most GEDCOM event tags is now included. Rather than just listing them as “not processed,” the information they contain will be formatted somewhat nicely into people’s notes. The tags include EDUCation, OCCUpation, NATIonality, RELIgion, SSN, CREMation, EMIGration, CENSus, WILL, and most others, with their subordinate detail.
* These tags formatted into people’s notes particularly include LDS ordinances for BAPL (LDS baptism), CONL (LDS confirmation), ENDL (endowment), SLGC (sealing of child to parents) and SLGS (sealing of spouses). Submission of these LDS ordinances is NOT supported.
* GEDCOM NOTE CONTinue lines without any text are now processed. In the notes window, line breaks (entered with the tab key) without any text and preceding other line breads with text are now saved.
* The messages in the GEDCOM listing file for the remaining unprocessed tags, as well as in people’s notes (the default option on import), now include the line number in which they appeared in the GEDCOM file. This line number appears at the end of the message in brackets, and is useful for those who understand the GEDCOM format, wish to examine the context of the line and have a text edit program (such as BBEdit) that can add line numbers to the displayed GEDCOM file.
* A cautionary alert is displayed when you ask to import a GEDCOM into a file that already contains some people.
* The Reference button now always displays the reference guide in your browser, and the menu item now always displays the reference guide in a separate PAWriter window.
* The Reference folder is updated to reflect these changes.