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13 June 2009
I started with a DOS version of Family Tree Maker, but soon tired of their practice of always trying to bundle in CD's which I found to be of no use, and their constant minor "upgrades", trying to get you to buy a newer version. If you searched around you could find the basic version without the CD's, but most stores didn't carry it.
I do have one of the first Windows versions of the program, but switched to PAF after reading about it, and I find that the PAF Companion to be quite useful; I like its version of an Ahnentafel report better than that generated by PAF, and the descendants report is well laid out. Since PAF is free, and PAF Companion is less than seven dollars, it makes a good, inexpensive combination.
As Cliff mentioned in his reply, PAF is based on an earlier version of Ancestral Quest, and that program can read and write PAF files, thus allowing the continued use of PAF Companion. Version 12.1 of Ancestral Quest has been modified to use the newest online databases maintained by the Family History Library, though those databases are currently still under test and not open to the general public. It's my understanding that the new format will eventually replace the Ancestral File database, as well as the Pedigree Resource File. I'm not sure about the IGI, since that is often single extractions rather than related individuals.
Ancestral Quest also allows you to convert to its native file format, but that format is not compatible with PAF Companion, and oddly enough, Ancestral Quest Charting Companion, available from the same folks that make PAF Companion, does not work properly with Ancestral Quest. The problem seems to be that native Ancestral Quest database uses the Unicode character set, rather than UTF-8 as PAF does, so any umlaut vowels do not display correctly. If your data does not require any special characters, then the AQ Charting Companion would probably work fine.
All in all, I've been quite pleased with PAF and would highly recommend the addition of PAF Companion. Once the new databases are opened to the public by the Family History Library, you can decide whether to get Ancestral Quest. As best as I've been able to determine, the current version of PAF is the end of the line, and in the future, if you wish to use the new databases, you'll need to switch over to Ancestral Quest. At least the switch will be painless, since it can read the PAF files.
Dave
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