Howard H. Metcalfe has released an updated version of Personal Ancestry Writer II (PAWriter II), a free genealogy program for Macintosh systems. Two versions are available: one for the OS X operating system and another for OS 9.
Personal Ancestry Writer II is modeled on the old LDS Personal Ancestral File program (PAF) for the Macintosh (for which all development stopped a few years ago after release 2.3.1). However, Personal Ancestry Writer II now contains features that never appeared in Personal Ancestral File for Macintosh, such as automatic generation of web pages in HTML, word processing files in RTF for AppleWorks and other word processors, and desktop publishing files in MML for FrameMaker. The generated report files include genealogical dictionaries, registers, ahnentafels and lineages, as well as a variety of text files and pedigree charts.
PAWriter also differs from the old Personal Ancestral File in another important feature: it has a very strong source citations database. Each person's vital statistics in PAWriter should be based on the evidence given or referenced in the notes for that person and/or for his or her relatives, and should represent the researcher's best current conclusions as to the true facts. For this purpose, the notes should contain all of the evidence, substantiation, documentation, background information, clarification, interpretation and/or other relevant commentary. It is in these notes that source citations are referenced through footnotes inserted at the appropriate points in the notes' text, as is normally done in books. (The footnotes will be included at the end of the printed notes in the generated reports.)
Version 83 contains a mix of bug fixes and new features:
Improved the fix for a rare note problem.
When the user exports a GEDCOM using ANSEL or UTF-8 (and that GEDCOM is not to be submitted for TempleReady), PAWriter will ask the user whether to "Exclude Events and Notes for Living People?" If the user clicks "Yes", then for any person whose Died popup is set to Living, PAWriter will not include in the GEDCOM birth, baptism and marriage dates and places nor any notes for more...that person.
Suppressed marriage number if only one marriage in all reports.
Added a preference check box to exclude a partner's other partner(s) and their children from all reports. For example, stepchildren and their parents' marriage will not be included when a report is written if this box is checked.
Displayed OS X draft windows in Arial font (the Geneva font doesn't display boldfaced text in OS X).
Animated the OS X watch cursor (visible when opening notes windows and draft windows).
You can learn more about Personal Ancestry Writer II at: http://www.lanopalera.net/Genealogy/AboutPAWriter.html.
You might also be interested in the PAWriter Forum at http://pawriter.proboards77.com.
