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Czech diacritics - Categorized in: 
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5 posts.
Started 25 Oct 2005 by larrycada. Latest reply 9 Dec 2005 by larrycada.
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Czech diacritics - Categorized in:
5 posts. Started 25 Oct 2005 by larrycada. Latest reply 9 Dec 2005 by larrycada. RSS
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Joined: Tue, 25 Oct 2005
0 blog comments, 3 forum posts
Posted: Tue, 25 Oct 2005
All my forebears and many of my relatives are Czech. I would like to enter their names and their places in Czech with the correct diacritic marks or accents on the letters. I decided not to use Family Tree Maker, becuse it only supports the Latin-1 character set for data entry. (That's enough for French, German, and Spanish; but not for Czech.) I switched to PAF, which supports all special characters needed for data entry of Czech names of people and places.
Will this someday be possible with Behold? (Or is it already possible with the alpha version I have now downloaded?) When I made a GEDCOM file and exported it from PAF to Behold, it displayed strange letters and symbols where ever there was a letter with a Czech diacritic mark in the original PAF file.
While I am writing, let me add a few words of praise, Louis, for the Behold program. For many years, I consulted your webpage on genealogy software and found it very helpful. When I found out that you were developing your own program, I decided to give it a try. I have to say that I am very pleased with what I have been able to do with it so far. Many thanks for devoting your computer know-how and your genealogy know-how to this project.
I will look forward to whatever help you can give me with the Czech diacritics. Let me know if you need more information from me in order to give an answer.
Sincerely, Larry Cada
Joined: Sun, 9 Mar 2003
287 blog comments, 245 forum posts
Posted: Tue, 25 Oct 2005
Regarding character sets: Currently Behold will read the ANSEL character set and convert it to the best representation of ASCII, usually with very few errors.
I do have in my near plans (see my Future Plans page) to do the same for the UTF character set for version 0.99, hopefully out in November. Once that is added, Behold should display almost all the characters correctly. I believe many versions of PAF output their GEDCOMs to UTF-8 when special characters are included. Since only your characters with diacritic marks do not display correctly, your GEDCOM is most likely UTF-8. Please check the top of your GEDCOM file for me and let me know what the CHAR tag near the top shows as the Character Set.
If you are willing to send me your GEDCOM (which I will only use to help develop Behold), I can make sure that Behold will read in and convert your UTF characters correctly. I don't currently have a good User-supplied GEDCOM using UTF-8 for testing (and I might even try to squeeze it into version 0.98)
However, the newest version of PAF is also one of the few programs that can use Unicode, which supports hundreds of languages. I do have in my very long-term plans to fully support Unicode. It won't make sense to do it until I add editing and it will be a big job, so I've left that to Version 2.5 (March 2008 IAGW).
Louis
Joined: Tue, 25 Oct 2005
0 blog comments, 3 forum posts
Posted: Wed, 26 Oct 2005
Thanks for your quick reply.
I looked at the GEDCOM that was exported from my PAF file to Behold, and it showed UTF-8 for the CHAR tag as the Character Set that was used.
Yes, I'm quite willing to send you a GEDCOM file exported from a PAF file I make. I will expand the file I already made with more people and places that use Czech diacritic marks and go back a few more generations. I will try to get in as many names of people and places as I can so that all the special characters that show up in Czech get used at least once. I'll add a note if I need more data entry to get all the special characters to show up at least once.
After I generate the larger GEDCOM file, how should I go about sending it to you?
Many thanks, Louis. It would make me very happy if you can use the file I send to test and improve Behold.
Larry Cada
Joined: Sun, 9 Mar 2003
287 blog comments, 245 forum posts
Posted: Wed, 26 Oct 2005
Louis
Joined: Tue, 25 Oct 2005
0 blog comments, 3 forum posts
Posted: Fri, 9 Dec 2005
My problems with Czech diacritical marks are solved! I tried the new 0.98 version of Behold and it diplays all the Czech accent marks beautifully. I purposely used a new GEDCOM file which I exported from PAF, which contains every one of the letters in the Czech alphabet which needs an accent (both upper and lower case). They all came out without a hitch. You have done a good job, Louis. You can be sure that I will be looking forward to the future versions of Behold; and that, so far, I am very satisfied with your program. Congratulations on figuring out how to handle some very complicated stuff, which is very important to my genealogy work.
Larry