Ancestral Author Plus Document Formatting

Formatting Output Documents

Ancestral Author Plus has new ways to control the ordering of text in your genealogy document.

Ancestral Author Plus

Ancestral Author Plus for Windows or Mac

Create hyperlinked genealogy documents in PDF or Open Office Format, Editable With LibreOffice or OpenOffice.

Ancestral Author Classic

Ancestral Author Classic for Windows

Ancestral Author Classic is no longer being sold as a product. For more information click the Read More button below.

 

  • DnD

    Easily Convert GEDCOM Files to PDF

    Ancestral Author Plus is an easy program to use. In it's most simple form, just drag your GEDCOM onto the Ancestral Author Plus desktop icon, and your genealogical research is immediately transformed into a fully hyperlinked, sourced, and indexed PDF document containing every person in your GEDCOM, presented in a modified register style. Why PDF? Click here. To see an example PDF created in this way, click here.

  • With As Much Control As You Want

    Or, if you want more control over the contents of your document, use the simple drag and drop interface to construct a document by inserting title pages, tables of contents, descendant reports, ancestor reports, pictures, chapters with headings, name indexes, source citations, and many other items. For a simple tutorial that explains how to do this, click here.

  • Hyperlinks

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    Ancestral Author Plus automatically inserts hyperlinks into your document, so you can navigate to parents, spouses, and children of a person just by clicking a link. No need to scroll through pages, or consult the name index. Even the table of contents is hyperlinked, making it simple to find chapters.

  • Import Text Into Chapters

    Chapters and sections are easy to create. You can create customized chapters containing such things as biographical sketches, family stories, discussion of research, acknowledgments, prefaces, appendices, and so on. Just write the text for these sections using a simple text editor or word processor, and import them into your document.

  • Drag And Drop User Interface

    Rearrange chapters and sections by simply dragging them into a new position.

  • Save Settings In Scripts

    Once you've set up your document exactly the way you want, with the right chapters, headings, title page, descendant reports, ancestor reports, and so on, you can save the settings in a script file. From that point forward, import the script file into Ancestral Author and it will automatically regenerate your document with hardly any effort on your part.

  • Easily Update Documents

    When you make changes to your GEDCOM, just open the script file with Ancestral Author Plus, and the document is automatically regenerated, with updated information from the GEDCOM, updated name indexes, source references, tables of contents, etc. This makes it easy to reflect GEDCOM updates into your documents.

  • Create Open Document Text (ODT) Wordprocessing Documents

    Besides PDF, Ancestral Author Plus can create word processing documents that can be viewed and modified with the free LibreOffice or OpenOffice word processing applications. This allows you to modify the documents produced by Ancestral Author Plus in any imaginable way. For more about the relative advantages of PDF vs. word processing output formats, click here.

  • Automatic Spell Checking And Correction

    One of the great benefits of LibreOffice (or OpenOffice) is that it can automatically perform spell checking and correction. Use Ancestral Author Plus to create a document, view it in LibreOffice, and use the Automatic Spell Checking menu item to find and correct spelling errors.

  • Display Sources As Endnotes or Footnotes

    Source citations can be displayed as endnotes, in a separate chapter at the end of the document, or as footnotes, on the same page as the citation.