Ancestral Author Plus is a desktop application that creates documents from GEDCOMs, images, text, and other source material. Documents can be created in Portable Document Format (PDF), or Open Document Text (ODT) format. For a full explanation, click here.

Ancestral Author Classic (AA Classic) is the predecessor of Ancestral Author Plus, first developed in the early 2000s. It is no longer being actively developed or sold as a separate product. Existing AA Classic customers should upgrade to Ancestral Author Plus, which has almost all of the functionality of AA Classic, plus much more. To upgrade, please contact support@AncestralAuthor.com, and we will provide more information about upgrading. For more details on the AA Classic retirement plan, click here.

ODT is an international standard, developed and maintained by an independent standards body. ODT is independent of any single company, and it's survival as a document standard does not depend on the economic health of any particular company. In this sense, it is a more durable standard than the Microsoft Word proprietary document format.

ODT is widely supported by open source (and commercial) products such as LibreOffice, OpenOffice, KOffice, Google Docs, Corel Wordperfect Suite, Sun Microsystems StarOffice, and many others. Even Microsoft Word can import ODT documents (though sometimes imperfectly).

Because of it's non-proprietary nature, ODT is sometimes preferred by governments and agencies around the world, primarily as a policy issue.

For more info, and links to technical specs, standards bodies, and organizations that promote the Open Document Format (superset of ODT), see here.

For a detailed explanation, click here.

Ancestral Author Plus uses the latest approved version of the GEDCOM Standard - 5.5.1. There are a few limitations that Ancestral Author Plus users should be aware of:

1. The GEDCOM 5.5.1 standard includes about 126 tags (types of data). AA+ recognizes all of the tags necessary to express genealogical relationships, vital events (birth, christening, baptism, marriage date and intention date, divorce, death, age at death, burial, etc), source citations, notes and narrative text, nicknames and alternate names, education, occupation, residence, religion, and images.
2. The standard also allows a GEDCOM to be expressed in one of several character sets. This is necessary to support different languages. AA+ supports the most common character sets: ISO-Latin-1 (also called ANSEL), and UTF-8, which is the international Unicode standard capable of encoding any character in any language. These two character encodings cover the vast majority of GEDCOMs. But occassionally a GEDCOM will be expressed in UTF-16, which is a 16-bit encoding standard. AA+ does not support UTF-16, and will cause AA+ to emit an error. Most applications that generate GEDCOMs will allow you to specify the character encoding. UTF-8 is best choice.

No, it does not support this extension to the GEDCOM standard - yet. GEDCOM 5.5EL is frequently used in Europe to better handle names and locations. Support will be added based on user demand.

Ancestral Author Plus allow users to change words and phrases used in the output text. It also gives you the additional flexibility to rearrange where categories of information appear in the output document. For example, some people prefer to see notes before the list of children. Others would rather see notes afterward. This is easily accomplished in Ancestral Author Plus.