User:DomoViridi

Some Personal Details

• Year of birth: 1961
• Nationality: Dutch (i.e. from The Netherlands)
• Main operating system in use: MacOS
• Languages: Dutch (native), English (very good), French (good), German (conversation level)

My Reasons for Using Gramps

• It's Open Source. No dependence on a company that may go out of business, be sold off to a bigger company, or start demanding a subscription fee.
• It's maintained with Git (as every self-respecting software package should), on GitHub (also nice).
• It's free.
• It's written in Python, a script language. Combined with the Open Source this means I can see and understand how the program works. With some effort I'll be able to write or improve code myself.
• Using Python, together with Gtk++ for the GUI, makes Gramps very portable.
• It's modular. This makes it easy to add some functionality without modifying the main program.
• It has special functionality to import data from Pro-Gen directly from its data files, without going through an intermediate file format such as GEDCOM.

My Experience

Early experiences, now obsolete

• Programming in 6502 machine code in the 1970s.
• Learning ALGOL and Pascal on the University mainframe in the 1980 (with punchcards!).
• BASIC dialects: Dartmouth, Microsoft (on various home computers), BBC Basic (which is effectively COMAL with nobs on).
• Handcoding HTML.

Professional Experience

• C programming for a company which developed and sold compilers and version control packages.
• Various dialects of Unix.
• Version control based on SCCS and later RCS.
• Proofreading English language documents before they were sent to customers.

Experience from Hobby

• Version control with Git (including using GitHub).
• Editing Wiki pages.
• Writing documents in LaTeX.
• Currently learning Python.

Special Interests

Genealogical Research

My research is focused on my personal ancestry. This means The Netherlands, with occasional branches to Germany (Kassel in Hesse), and England (Hull in Yorkshire), and general bleeding over into bordering territories in Germany/Holy Roman Empire, Belgium and France.

A main branch of my family lived in the northeast of the country, which means mainly patronymic naming. Lots of Hendrik Jans, son of Jan Hendriks, son of Hendrik Jans, etcetera.

Big fonts

As my eyesight is getting worse with age, I tend to use larger fonts than the default. I am interested in situations where the layout of information is distorted by the use of a larger font, or where text flows outside a box. On many websites and in applications this causes problems when implementers overlook the posibillity of larger fonts.

Gramps is very good about this, and I have not yet seen any problems.

If any such problems occur, I would be interested in assisting to fix them.

Gramps

• Currently (Jan 2026) working on a Chart View addon to show a quick ancestry overview in the form of an H tree, with little person or family detail, but lots of generations.
• May be doing some maintenance on Addon:HtreePedigreeView, which I used as a basis for my addon.
• Before Gramps, I used Pro-Gen. Importing from Pro-Gen into Gramps is supported by special code that reads the Pro-Gen data files directly. Unfortunately this code is powerful but very poorly documented, giving no information on the intent and effect of the various import options. I hope to expand the manual, and analyse the code to discover the details of its workings.

Gramps Wiki

• Maintenance of the manual: correct spelling and grammer
• (Mar 2026) Rework the Latin words and expressions page and its translations.

Links

• TempTest A sandbox to test development of the Latindict, Latindict/A and Dict templates for the Latin words and expressions page and its translations.
• Temsects A sandbox to test linking to sections that are inside a template, and getting edit links for those sections that open the template for editing.