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CD-ROM Aktief 1995 #3
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README
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1992-09-03
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PAFCTOOL
PAF Tools with C source Code
by Stephen A. Wood
saw@cebaf.gov
September 3, 1992
PAFCTOOL is a collection of "Free" PAF utilities and their C source code
that work with PAF version 2.2. Read the file LICENSE for the conditions
under which this software may be used.
At the moment there are three utilities in this collection of PAF tools. It
is my hope that providing the source code will encourage others to create
other "Free" utilities.
The utilities NOTEDUMP and NUPDATE are used together to dump all the notes
from a PAF database into a single ASCII file, allowing them to be edited with
any text editor, and then read back into the PAF database, replacing the
existing notes with the edited notes.
The program ALIVE is a crude attempt to print out the birthdays of everyone
in a PAF database who is alive. This it does if the person has no death date
recorded and they are not too old. The output can be used with the program
PCAL to get birthdays printed on the Postscript calendars made by PCAL. ALIVE
could clearly be modified to produce output suitable for other calendar
programs that may exist. ALIVE tries to guess what the last name of a married
woman is, putting the maiden name in brackets. If a woman has been married
several times, it may guess wrong as to which is the current marriage, so may
get the last name wrong. It does not check marriage dates. (Of course it
won't know when a woman has not changed her name to her spouse.)
-----
Very briefly, here is what you should do if you want to use the NOTEDUMP
and NUPDATE programs to edit PAF notes.
1. Make a backup of your paf database.
2. From the directory that contains the paf database, type
NOTEDUMP > PAF.NOT
3. Edit the notes. The format should be clear. Don't mess with the lines
that begin with % that surround each note. You can entirely remove the
% lines and note for a given person though, then when you read this note
file back in, that person simply will not be updated.
4. After you have finished editing the notes to your satisfaction, type the
following
NUPDATE < PAF.NOT
That will update all the notes with the notes in PAF.NOT. NUPDATE will
make backup copies of NOTES2.DAT and INDIV2.DAT, the only two files that
it modifies.
NOTEDUMP has some options. Normally it only writes out note entry for those
individuals that have notes in the paf database. If you use the -e option,
it will write out an entry for every individual. You can then use an
editor to insert note material for anyone in the database.
The -a option will append the various name, place and date information that
is contained in the paf database onto the end of the note material. As an
example of how this can be useful, I often put information that I have
gotten from the IGI or Ancestral file into a PAF database. (separate from
my family database). The IGI or AF data often contains duplicate entrys
for individuals which have different event dates. If I just do a merge
of these individuals in PAF, I can loose some of the conflicting information
and what sources it came from. By using the -a option I can get all that
data put into notes. Then when the various records for an individual get
merged, the various dates and their sources are recorded in notes.
I find that in using these tools, I go back and forth between PAF and the
text editor. If you use the -a option, it only makes sense to use it the
first time that you do a NOTEDUMP.
Please bear in mind that you can trash your paf database if you are not
careful. I am pretty confident that things are OK if the tools are used
properly, but always be careful.
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