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PAFNAMES.REV
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1993-06-01
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╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Review of PAFNAMES - From File PAFNAMES.REV ║
╟──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ PAF Review - Edition 93.4 - June 1993 ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Based on a problem with PAFNAMES which was reported on FidoNet
Genealogy Software conference, I ran a number of tests to see how
well it works and what limitations might be encountered.
PAFNAMES creates a very useful report, although it can be
voluminous. In one alphabetical list you have a person's name (all
names), RIN, birth year, death year, own MRIN, spouse's name,
spouse's RIN, parent's name (father/mother if no father), parent's
RIN and parent's MRIN. You can choose to list married women under
their married name, in addition to their maiden name. If you do
so, they are sorted alphabetically in with the male's surnames but
these married surnames are shown within square brackets.
To fit this much data on each line of the report requires very
small print to allow 133 characters per line. If you have an Epson
dot matrix printer, or compatible, it works fine. Unfortunately
there are no provisions for changing to another printer type so on
my laser and ink jet printers it only prints the first 6 fields on
each line (through the spouse's name.) By using one of many
available programs that will printer output to be redirected to a
file, the report can be routed through WordPerfect or another word
processor allowing use of other printers.
The program seems to run fine in a moderate amount of memory, with
my tests at 256k no slower than those at 620k. It does require
quite a few files to be open at once during the final merge and
print step, depending on how many individuals are in your files and
whether you included the married women under both maiden and
married surnames. If you don't have a line in your CONFIG.SYS file
giving a "FILES=" parameter, or if it is set too low, PAFNAMES may
fail. On my test machine, and my test data, FILES=16 would have
been sufficient. Under Windows or with a larger database, a larger
number would be required.
I've deduced PAFNAMES works as follows:
First it reads all the individuals in your database gathering
information for the sort.
As these records are read, they are sorted and writen in
groups of individuals to several temporary files. With my
test of 3600 individuals, eight the temporary files were
needed. I also replied yes to include each wife under her
married surname which expands the number of records to be
sorted.
Finally the temporary files are read and merged as the report
is printed. This step must open all the temporary files and
four others simultaneously.