Exporting gedcom to TNG

[Barnbarroch]

Hi,
Can any one those who are experienced in combining Reunion with TNG tell me what GEDCOM character set I should use to export to TNG?

I keep getting anomalies where " should be, like this: Edward ?Eddie? VANCE.

Grateful for any help,
Jamie.

[donworth]

Re: Exporting gedcom to TNG

Windows character set

[theKiwi]

Re: Exporting gedcom to TNG

Hi,
Can any one those who are experienced in combining Reunion with TNG tell me what GEDCOM character set I should use to export to TNG?

I keep getting anomalies where " should be, like this: Edward ?Eddie? VANCE.

It depends on your TNG setup.

You need to check several things:

1 - what is the setting of the database on the server? To find out you need to use your host's cPanel to look at phpMyAdmin to find out if the collation of the database and the tables within it are set to something like latin1_xxxxxx_ci (xxxxxxx might be swedish for example) or utf8_xxxxxx_ci.

2 - what is set in TNG Admin ------> Setup ------> General Settings ------> Language - is that set to "English" or "English-UTF8"?

The answers to 1 and 2 should line up - so

if 1 says utf8_xxxxxx and 2 says English-UTF8 then you should export a GEDCOM file from Reunion using UTF-8 (do NOT choose Unicode)

if 1 says latin1_xxxxx and 2 says English you should export a GEDCOM file from Reunion using UTF-8

If 1 and 2 don't line up, you need to change 2 to match 1 and then proceed as above for the GEDCOM file.

Roger

[donworth]

Re: Exporting gedcom to TNG

Roger,

I have been using Windows because that seems to be the only export option for Reunion that correctly outputs the umlauts (for Swedish) and the apostrophes in English, etc. I got to it by trial and error - the other Reunion GED export character set options messed things up.

I checked my setup based on what you posted:

CPANEL:
Server connection collation = utf8_general_ci
Server charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)

TNG settings:
Language Folder = English
Character Set = ISO-8859-1

As I said, using the Windows option in Reunion seems to produce perfect results for me with the above settings.

Does this reconcile with what you said? Or do you see hidden problems for me?

Thanks!
Don

[rodrigue]

Re: Exporting gedcom to TNG

Roger,

I have been using Windows because that seems to be the only export option for Reunion that correctly outputs the umlauts (for Swedish) and the apostrophes in English, etc. I got to it by trial and error - the other Reunion GED export character set options messed things up.

I checked my setup based on what you posted:

CPANEL:
Server connection collation = utf8_general_ci
Server charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)

TNG settings:
Language Folder = English
Character Set = ISO-8859-1

As I said, using the Windows option in Reunion seems to produce perfect results for me with the above settings.

Does this reconcile with what you said? Or do you see hidden problems for me?

Thanks!
Don

I have the same settings as Don for the CPANEL and TNG (with the exception that I use both English and French in a couple of TNG databases, and French only in two other TNG databases), and I also use the Windows option in my Reunion GEDCOM export. And all is OK.

R

[theKiwi]

Re: Exporting gedcom to TNG

I checked my setup based on what you posted:

CPANEL:
Server connection collation = utf8_general_ci
Server charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)

These are not the settings that are relevant here.

You need to look at the actual database in phpMyAdmin and see what the collation is for the actual tables.

See attached screen shot.

Given that your setup works, I would expect it says latin1_swedish_ci

If it says utf8_general_ci then it should not work with a Windows GEDCOM file containing accented characters and other things like curly quotes.

This seems to be Barnbarroch's situation - if things like curly quotes are messed up, there is definitely a mismatch between the character set of the GEDCOM file and the settings in TNG and in the database structure.

Roger

[rodrigue]

Re: Exporting gedcom to TNG

These are not the settings that are relevant here.

You need to look at the actual database in phpMyAdmin and see what the collation is for the actual tables.

See attached screen shot.

Given that your setup works, I would expect it says latin1_swedish_ci

If it says utf8_general_ci then it should not work with a Windows GEDCOM file containing accented characters and other things like curly quotes.

This seems to be Barnbarroch's situation - if things like curly quotes are messed up, there is definitely a mismatch between the character set of the GEDCOM file and the settings in TNG and in the database structure.

Roger

Hi, Roger.

In my case, it does indeed say latin1_swedish_ci (see attached screen shot).

R

[theKiwi]

Re: Exporting gedcom to TNG

In my case, it does indeed say latin1_swedish_ci (see attached screen shot).

Yep, so that's why you have to export from Reunion using Windows character set.

The world wide web has long ago moved to UTF-8

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/en-utf8/all/all

and popular web technologies like WordPress insist on being in UTF-8, so for example if you ever wanted to incorporate your TNG into a WordPress blog you would have to first of all convert your TNG site and the MySQL database to be UTF-8 also.

And my recommendation to anyone starting out with a new TNG site would be to use UTF-8 for the character set from the outset unless your desktop genealogy software doesn't support UTF-8 export (there are a few Windows ones that don't support UTF-8).

Roger