Customizing GEDitCOM II with GENerel

You can customize GEDitCOM II with the GEDitCOM Editor. You work in this editor to build the browser styles that GEDitCOM II uses to edit, display, export, and print the GEDCOM Records, Structures and Lines. Browser styles are mainly composed of scripts, called templates, related to records and tags (see Parts of a Browser Style). This section explains how to write those templates. The scripting language used in templates is called GENerel, which stands for GENealogy editing, reporting, and exporting language. See GENerel Language Reference for language syntax and logic-control commands; this section assumes you are familiar with the syntax and then explains how to use GENerel for writing templates for GEDCOM data.

The topics for getting started writing GENerel templates are:

Where to Go From Here

After reading the above topics, he following help topics are the most important ones for detailed information about writing templates:

  1. Read the GENerel language reference information. For genealogy data, an important concept is a GEDCOM expression. These expressions are used frequently in templates to extract text from the GEDCOM data for display in the window.
  2. Next read through the custom commands for formatting genealogy data.
  3. The most important command is the cell command. You should read about all the various types of cells and the various properties supported by each cell type.
  4. If records get long, it can be helpful to split the display in "Panes" or "Tabs." where each pane shows part of the record (e.g., main details, events, mulitmedia, notes and sources, etc.). See help on multipane record displays to use this technique.
  5. See the localization information to learn how to write templates that support multiple languages. The most important concept is to use expressions with the local() function.