Cute Tricks and Ideas For Using Family History CD

-- by Jon --

There are so many things that can be done with Family History CD. This page is to show you some of the ways to do things that you may have been wanting to do. If you have ideas for possible inclusion on this page, send an e-mail to Jon.

Get Professional Prints of Your CD Photos, Easily!

Take any CD that has been created with Family History CD to a store that has a machine for digital photos. Just put the CD into the CD drive and your photos will appear on the screen for you to choose from to have them make prints for you. You will also be able to print your front page design, if you wish.

Many stores now have these machines. Example: Walmart, Costco, etc.

The Freedom of Transparent Buttons  Special thanks to Vikki Downs

Transparent files are small jpg or gifs that are invisible and allow the background image to show through. They are used in web pages to hold the cells of tables open to accommodate page layout. You can find them at various linkware web graphic sites for download. On your Family History CD front page, they can give you extreme design freedom when arranging links and layouts.

AFTER ACQUIRING TRANSPARENT IMAGE

1. Open a window explorer and access your buttons folder. Usually: C:Program Files/family history CD/images/buttons.

2. Drag transparent image into folder. It will now appear as an option when adding a button to your front page.

To download your own transparent image, right click here, then choose "Save Target As" and save to c:\Program Files\Family History CD\Images\Buttons

OPTIONAL USES:

1. Opening the transparent image as your button choice still allows you to apply text. The result is a line of text simply against background as link.

2. A transparent button can be selected and text deleted. This simple box can be resized to any dimension to make a linking territory out of any portion of your front page layout. Be sure to instruct CD users how to find them: example, a group photo can have transparent buttons on the faces of each individual. A line of text under the image can read "click on the person to view their history" History could be replace with any file: genealogy/Christmas letter/video interview. With the option in future versions possibly making linking to individual photo folders possible, you could link to slide shows of baby pictures of each person.

Example of how a transparent button was placed over text to make the text appear to be the button or link.


CD author: Vikki Downs, Gillenbran
CD Subject: an anthology of Halloween celebrations to date of my 6 & 4 year old girls
Design by Joyful Heart Design (www.ajoyfulheart.com)

Put a link to your favorite website from your CD project.

You can create a link to your favorite website just by "adding " a file like the following example to your project.

You can copy and paste the text in the box below into Wordpad (or any text editor), change the website name in the "window.location" statement and save it with the html extension. Then all you have to do is "Add" it as a file to your "Other" category and you're done! The contents of the file must look like the following. Just replace the "www.yourwebsite.com" with the name of the website you want to go to. You can name the file anything you want except it must have the "HTML" or "HTM" extension (either works fine).



Editing the file in Wordpad or Notepad makes sure that it will be saved as text. If you edit it with a Word Processor like Microsoft Word or Word Perfect, then it must be saved as an ASCII text file, not as a Word or WordPerfect file.
Examples of naming the file:
smithwebsite.html
myfamilyweb.htm

Just "add" this file to your "Other" category as you would any other file. Don't forget you can add this as a "single item" when you add a button so that the button on the front screen will go directly to the web page without having to go to the next page to make the choice.

Put a Power Point presentation on your CD

You can put a Power Point presentation into your Family History CD project, but you do have to know a couple of tricks to make it work.

If you have created a Power Point project that you would like to include with all of your other multi-media files in a Family History CD project, then just follow these steps:

1. With your Power Point project loaded into the Power Point software, go to the drop down "File" menu in the upper left corner of the Power Point window and choose the Package For CD option. Then click the Copy To Folder button and follow the directions to save the project to an empty folder.

2. In Family History CD, "Add" the "ppt" file to your project preferably into it's own folder.

Note: Because the Power Point project contains a number of files and not just one file, we need to find and copy the rest of the files into the same folder in our project by doing the following...

3. Using Windows Explorer, find the folder where you saved the Power Point project and mark and copy all of the contents.

4. Also using windows explorer, find the folder in the Family History CD project where the "ppt" file was placed while in the Other File Organizer page in Family History CD.

Note: The normal path to where you will find the folder containing the "ppt" file is as follows: c:\Program Files\Family History CD\Projects\FHP000xx where xx is the number of the project. You can find the number of the project by following the instructions contained in Appendix B in the user manual.

5. Paste all of the copied contents into the Family History CD folder where the "ppt" file was placed.

Save a Web Page To Your Project

You can save a web page to your project by either clicking on the Edit drop down menu in your browser and doing a "Select All" or by clicking on the File drop down menu and and then clicking on "Save As". Either way, you can then give the file a name and save it.

The trick is to make sure the photos on the page are also available. Each photo is a separate file from the HTML file. The HTML file only has an address or link as to where to find the photos so they can be retrieved when you view the web page in your browser. When saving an HTML page using Internet Explorer, a subfolder will be created that contains the photos. The HTML file will be changed to reflect that the photos are in this subfolder. Example: I save a web page as MyWebSite.html (or htm, either works). Within the folder where I saved MyWebSite.html, I will find a new folder named MyWebSite_files. Inside the new MyWebSite_files folder will be all of the images that was on the original web page that I saved. The addresses or links to the photos have actually been changed to find the photos in the new subfolder that was created automatically. So wherever this web HTML file is stored, then this subfolder with all of the contents must be there, too.

This photo folder will need to be placed there manually for your project. This can be done in Windows Explorer by copying the folder and pasting it into your project into the correct folder where you added the HTML file. The Other category would be a good place for your HTML page. You can do a "Windows Explorer search" for the HTML file that you have placed into your project. Take note as to what folder the HTML file resides in, then copy and paste the above mentioned folder into that same folder. For further clarification as to which project the HTML page is in, see Appendix B of the Family History CD manual by clicking any Help button, then clicking the View User Manual button that then comes into view. You can then browse or search for the HTML file.

Be sure to check on the copyrights of any content of a website before using for your own purposes.

I  just want to save the photos from a web page, not the whole web page.

Most any image on the web can be saved as a photo. First right click with your mouse on the image. Then choose "Save Picture As". These photos can be used in Family History CD as any other photo. Many of these may be a lower resolution, lower quality photo to aid in the quick loading of a web page for viewing.

Be sure to check on the copyrights of any content of a website before using for your own purposes.