WinFreeREG is the latest incarnation of the FreeREG transcripiton program for transcribing Parish Registers and other, similar documents. It comes about because of the total redesign and implementation of the FreeREG web site, which caused the original transcription program (WinREG) to cease being useful for anything other than capturing data.
In particular, WinREG lost the ability to interct with the web site which meant users have had to resort to using a web browser to perform these tasks. This has been addressed in WinFreeREG.
At the same time, it was known that there was a lack of standardisation in the naming of places and churches. Two transcribers working on registers for the same place would provide differing spellings of the place name, resulting in confusion for researchers.
A decision was taken that WinFreeREG should directly address this problem. And so, WinFreeREG now dictates what spellings should be used by transcribers for place and church names. This is done by restricting these data items to what is held on the web site and which have been downloaded to the transcribers PC. If names have not been downloaded, they can not be entered by the transcriber, who must now ensure they have downloaded the appropriate itenms before they begin transcribing a register.