GEDCOM

GEDCOM is a sort of lingua-franca that all genealogical software understand, at least partially.

Unfortunately, this is not a standard, and all the tools have added their own extensions to it, to counter-balance the limitation of the official GEDCOM. As a result, it is in general impossible to export all your genealogical data from your current software into a GEDCOM file. More importantly, the tools will not, in general, report which data they have not exported.

Assuming the export went correctly, the other software (and in particular Geneaprove) has to import it. Again, most software cannot import all the GEDCOM files out there, although most will try and report the parts of the file they did not understand.

Geneaprove is no different. It can import some GEDCOM files, but at this stage the testing has been fairly limited.

I have personnaly experienced with importing files from Gramps (which is still my genealogical software of choice), and RootsMagic.

Geneaprove will handle correctly utf-8 Gedcom files (as opposed to some of the mainstream genealogical applications). Thus, it will preserve accents in names (and everywhere, of course). Some attempt is made to import other encodings (for instance, Heredis exports as ANSI, although the gedcom norm forbids this), but this support is partial at the moment. We recommend to always export as utf-8.

I would be interested in improving the parser so that it can accept files generated by the major genealogical applications out there. The second step will be to ensure that all the data within those files is correctly imported into the Geneaprove database.