

			    PAFCTOOL version 1.1
			PAF Tools with C source Code

				by Stephen A. Wood
				saw@cebaf.gov
				February 20, 1995

PAFCTOOL is a collection of "Free" PAF utilities and their C source
code that work with PAF versions 2.2 and 2.3.  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.

NUPDATE has two options.  The -v option will cause NUPDATE to display
a message as it updates each RIN's notes.  The -n option will inhibit
the creation of backup copies of NOTES2.DAT and INDIV2.DAT.  Do this
only if you have a backup of your original database.

NOTEDUMP, NUPDATE, and ALIVE take an optional argument that is the
path of the directory that contains the PAF database.  If this
argument is not given, then these programs assume that the database is
in the current directory.

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.

_________________________________________________________________________

A MAKEFILE is included that will compile the included sources using
Turbo C.  The file MAKEFILE.UNX is also included for compiling these
programs under unix.  When these programs were first developed in
1992, it was not apparant even to me why it would be usefull to run
these tools under unix.  However, now that free unices are available
for PC's, some might find unix editors more convenient that DOS
editors.  I use these tools under Linux, and edit the note file with
emacs.
