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Quick Start Guide

Thank you for choosing Family Book Creator. Family Book Creator has been successfully installed on your computer: The Family Book Creator plugin is now available from the plugin menu of your Family Tree Maker application.

Creating a family book is a simple, four step process:

  1. Create a document containing the information you would like to see in your book
  2. Preview your pages, proofread your document and get all issues fixed
  3. Print the document
  4. Get beautiful books

1.   Create a document containing the information you would like to see in your book

  • Open Family Tree Maker and select the starting individual of your book as current individual
  • Open the Family Book Creator plugin from the Tools menu
  • Specify which individuals are going to be included in your book on the 'Individuals to include' tab. Select 'Ancestor of', if you would like to create a book about ancestor of the selected starting individual or select 'Descendants of', if the book is about his or her descendants.
  • You may customize, which facts and details should be included, on the 'Items to include' tab page or just use the default settings.
  • Click the "Create Document" button and specify the location and filename used to create a book document. When finished, the proper application will launch automatically and open your document.

2.  Preview your pages, proofread your document and get all issues fixed

Please review the content of your book before publishing. You should make changes in the FTM file and regenerate the document until the document looks fine. The changes should not be done inside the word processor. The goal of the plugin is, to generate the book document from information found inside your Family Tree Maker database. If you need to add individuals or fine-tune information, it should be done inside Family Tree Maker and not inside the generated document.

3.   Print the document

We recommend sending the document to a PDF printer before wasting real paper. You may later decide to print the document on your own printer or search a DTP shop near your site to get your document printed and bound as a book. It might be also a good idea to use a print on demand service.

4.   Get beautiful books

You need to decide how you would like to publish your book…