Format Question

[kmgenealogy]

Re: Format Question

Frank (and others),

Just found this information on what formats the Library of Congress (LOC) recommends for preserving different types of information for the future. Although mainly aimed at libraries, could be helpful to genealogists also. They give a list for each category, in the order of preference:

http://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/

Be sure to check out the links at the bottom of the page for more information.

This looks very helpful! Thanks to Lisa Louise Cooke's GenealogyGems site/blog-23 Jun 2014. http://lisalouisecooke.com/blog/ for the reference!

HTH

Kaye

[sgtbob]

Re: Format Question

I've tried to save all photos - both original scanned pictures and those I download - as .jpg in an electronic folder. Most documentation I have encountered, I save in .pdf format. Both photos and documents are pretty easy to scan or to convert in my MAC system from incoming data to their respective .jpg/.pdf format.

I keep a rather large file of original documents in my file cabinet that I am reluctant to discard - not sure what will become of them, but for now I just store them and can access them from my digital files. I make at least three backups to external hard drives I maintain, one of which I rotate through my safety deposit box every 6 months, one I store with a relative (and exchange annually) and one I have with my MAC. Probably overkill, but....

Possibly not the ideal method, but this seems to have worked for me the past 10-15 years - a relatively short period when compared to longevity - and if a better method appears, I have no problem with changing.

Bob

[donworth]

Re: Format Question

Frank,

I did a book back in the 90s and I used a page layout program on the Mac (I think it was PageMaker). Later I switched to Windows and, for a while, it was possible to convert files from Mac PageMaker to Windows PageMaker, but at some point my files stopped working. Now I'm back on a Mac and I'm using InDesign. Back in 1996 I had run all the chapters in the book out as PDF files - and those are the files I can still use today to make copies of that book. And I have the physical printed book, of course.

Anyway, I still have the ingredients that went into my book - the text (it's in the notes field in Reunion) and the photos (in JPG format). All I really lost was the page formatting and the ability to update the book. That could be done again without too much work if I really needed to do it. Or I could just publish a supplement to the original book.

Best to keep your stuff in multiple formats - including hard copy - and then you can always, with some work, get things back to where you want them.

Don

[Bill McQuary]

Re: Format Question

Adobe bought PageMaker and it evolved into Adobe InDesign. The current version is ID CS6, now, I believe, only available by subscription to Adobe's Creative Cloud. I'm not sure it can read your Pagemaker file or, if it can, whether the formatting will be intact.

Good Luck,
Bil

[donworth]

Re: Format Question

Adobe bought PageMaker and it evolved into Adobe InDesign. The current version is ID CS6, now, I believe, only available by subscription to Adobe's Creative Cloud. I'm not sure it can read your Pagemaker file or, if it can, whether the formatting will be intact.

Good Luck,
Bil

Bill,

Actually, CS6 of ID (which I have) is not subscription-based. It is the last version before Adobe went to the cloud model (Creative Cloud - CC).

Unfortunately, the very early versions of Mac PageMaker doc types are not readable by InDesign CS6. I have a whole bunch with file dates in the 1990s (which is when I converted from a Mac to Windows for a 10 year stint in Microsoft hell) that won't open - probably created with PM 4 or 5 around 1996 - which used a completely different file format that Adobe no longer supports. According to Wikipedia:

"Support for versions 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 and 6.5 is no longer offered through the official Adobe support system. Due to Aldus' use of closed, proprietary data formats, this poses substantial problems for users who have works authored in these legacy versions."

Those files haven been inaccessible for me ever since. I have a couple of them that were converted to PM6 files that do open. Wish I had converted them all when I had the chance!

Don

[dante]

Re: Format Question

For those will old documents that are difficult to open, have you tried LibreOffice ? http://www.libreoffice.org

Thank you so much for this tip- I have several Appleworks docs that I was trying to figure out how to do this easily and it works well.

[Frank Zwolinski]

Re: Format Question

Hello folks,

Unless I missed something, only Kaye gave a suggestion for a format for saving word processing documents and that was "pdf." Does anyone else have any suggestions that work for them? Remember, in addition, I have a "hard copy" of everything. So I am just asking for an electronic format for permanency.

This has been a wonderful discussion and VERY helpful!! Let's keep it going!

Thanks to you all,
Frank

[donworth]

Re: Format Question

Frank,

For long-term storage I use PDF for text or page-layout documents (like my books) but another format that is probably safer than WORD is Rich Text Format (RTF) since it is an open standard.

for my images I use JPG for the most part and some TIFF, but I find the storage requirements for TIFF are not worth the tradeoff to avoid compression artifacting for most of my photos (which can often be of limited quality to start with). I scan at 600 dpi to offset the loss due to compression in JPG and that seems to work well for me. (I have several thousand images and I want to send them to cousins, so storage size is a consideration for me.) If original photos are really tiny or the image is unique and dear to me I might scan them much higher than 600 dpi or resort to TIFF.

My paper documents from before there were computers are all scanned in JPG. I don't bother to OCR anything. When I get something from a web site (census image from Ancestry or a screen capture of a web page) I save them to JPG (compression isn't going to matter on those) or I print the web page to PDF. I also changed Mac screen captures to save as JPG rather than PNG.

I do keep all my InDesign files for my books. But, as we talked about earlier in this thread, you can't always count on being able to open them someday.

I use Mac MAIL and often drag emails into my various genealogy folders since a lot of my correspondence with distant relatives where we discovered things about our ancestry is in email messages. Or they may send me image(s) with captioning information in the associated email. It turns out .eml files are just text files with a different file name suffix. So, even if Mac MAIL is no longer around someday, I will be able to access them with a simple text editor. Just be sure to save all the attachments to a folder (as JPG, TIFF, PDF, or RTF), then drag the email message(s) into the same folder, and you have your correspondence saved in a form that will work in the future.

I also run my Reunion files out to GEDs periodically and put them in a folder in my Genealogy folder. That way, if Reunion is no longer around, I can get at my data since GEDs are just text files also.

And I have audio files that I transferred from cassette tapes that I made during interviews of my elderly relatives going back to the 1970s. I have them all in .mp3 format since it's pretty universal (at least at the moment).

I have some video too - I ran it all out to DVDs then stored the files that went onto the DVDs on my external hard drive in DVD video/audio format (MPEG-1 or 2 - I forget which).

Don

[Frank Zwolinski]

Re: Format Question

Don,
Quite complete! Thank you.
One question, please
"I also changed Mac screen captures to save as JPG rather than PNG.'
How do you do that?
I have been using "Grab." i do not know about "Mac screen captures."
Frank

[donworth]

Re: Format Question

One question, please
"I also changed Mac screen captures to save as JPG rather than PNG.'
How do you do that?
I have been using "Grab." i do not know about "Mac screen captures."
Frank

It's Command-shift-4 then drag through what you want to capture. It makes a camera shutter click and puts the file on your desktop.

This article tells how to change from PNG to JPG (although you have to issue a terminal command and "kill" a process. Not for the squeamish! But you only have to do it once.)

http://theturninggate.net/2012/08/change-screen-capture-file-format-on-mac-os-x/

A lot of people swear by Snag-It and other screen capture programs. I already have an image editor (PhotoShop) and can use the built-in screen capture described above and they work fine for my purposes.

[Frank Zwolinski]

Re: Format Question

Don,
Thank you for the tutorial--I think I must be one of the "squeamish!"
"Grab" is free and works so, I think I will forgo, but thank you for answering my question.
I get a LOT from your contributions and DO, thank you!!
Frank

[donworth]

Re: Format Question

Thanks, Frank. I'm happy to share what I've figured out - although everyone's "mileage may differ".

For a long time I just loaded the PNG file into my photo editor and saved it back out as JPG - which works too if you don't want to use terminal. But if you've got something that works well for you, then it's all good!

Don

[Frank Zwolinski]

Re: Format Question

Don,

You are welcome! And to all of you who contributed to this thread--THANK YOU!!
I hope this discussion continues as is has been most informative and shows just how helpful other genealogists are with their experiences and opinions.

Let's keep chatting!!!

Frank

[kmgenealogy]

Re: Format Question

Hello folks,

Unless I missed something, only Kaye gave a suggestion for a format for saving word processing documents and that was "pdf." Does anyone else have any suggestions that work for them? Remember, in addition, I have a "hard copy" of everything. So I am just asking for an electronic format for permanency.

This has been a wonderful discussion and VERY helpful!! Let's keep it going!

Thanks to you all,
Frank

Did you check out the Library of Congress site that I mentioned on Jun 26th? If so, were the suggestions helpful? I'm thinking I'll go through the info and pull out the lists & info that would apply more to us.

[kmgenealogy]

Re: Format Question

Don,
Thank you for the tutorial--I think I must be one of the "squeamish!"
"Grab" is free and works so, I think I will forgo, but thank you for answering my question.
I get a LOT from your contributions and DO, thank you!!
Frank

I use "Grab" a lot. It comes free with every Mac (see Utilities folder in Applications). It saves as a TIFF file. If you don't want to worry about large files, open the TIFF file in Preview, choose File > "Export". A Finder screen will come up so you can choose the location where you want the file to go.

At the bottom of the Finder screen, there is a drop-menu where you can change the format. Choices usually are JPEG, JPEG-2000, OpenEXR (have no idea what this is), PDF, PNG & TIFF. Some of the choices allow you to determine the quality (kb & MB) & other determinations using a slide or another drop-menu.

I believe you can do this with anything that will open in Preview, including the above formats.

Hope this is helpful.