House Time Line Plugin : Problem with fonts

Hello,

I try to use House TimeLine plugin (Gramplet), but I got this

image

Specific font is required ?

Gramps 5.1.3 - Linux Mint 20.04 LTS

Welcome

Did some exploring with the code.

In the housetimeline.py at line 41 is the font used by the Gramplet

tag.set_property("font", "Courier 8")

To see if things could be changed, I altered mine to

tag.set_property("font", "DejaVu Sans 12")

This is the font I have set my overall Gramps font in Themes.

Everything still works except for the drawing of the House. I did not do a lot of tinkering to set a font where the House still displays. I just set the Configuration to not display the house. Since I set the Gramplet to open in the Dashboard, in the view Configuration Gramps-config there will be the overall view config (colmns) then loaded Gramplet configs.

So the bottom line is that you will be able to set the app to use a font you have.

FYI Plugins are installed under your User directoryā€™s version folder. gramps51\plugins\

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The default font should probably be a multi-level sans-serif with multiple fallbacks.

Like

font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif

See this cross-platform suggestion for web fonts

Thanks !

Setting font at line 41 of pluginā€™s source code works fine, text is readable.

But, as I can read text I also see informations are from Address tab and not from Events (type Residence) I used.

I should investigate more on how Address and Event (RESI tag ?) should work in Gramps and GEDCOMā€¦ (it seems to me that an address record could be linked to an event when tag RESI is setā€¦ ???)
GEDCOM seems easy to understand, but so old and some specifications are not enough detailed to be really clearā€¦

However, thanks all for your help ! :+1:

Ahhhā€¦ Yes, the House timeline works off of the Address tab. And to be of any real value should be used by copying the address from the clipboard to ensure each address is the same for each person who lived there. (A misspelling becomes a new address.) And in theory (or good record keeping) with all the various time spans the various people lived at the address, a fuller picture can be gleaned from the information. To really make it work, you would also track each personā€™s history of residences through time.

Alas, a lot of work and I tend to just use it to store my nearest relatives with their current information.

There is the Place Report where you can select a place and print people and events. If you have an actual street address as the place this could be useful to you when combined with a Residence event type.

I just submitted a ā€œtweakā€ PR#664 to increase the font size from 9pt to 12pt, add an emoji as the default instead of the ā€œASCII Artā€ house, and render the divider as a horizontal bar.

But this gramplet would benefit from using the default monotype or Theme settings

And @UlrichDemlehner noted in a 2020 request that the House Timeline is a ā€œDashboardā€ gramplet: it returns timelines for every Address entry in the tree. He wanted a variant that could generate timelines for only the Active Personā€™s addressesā€¦ or the addresses from a Person filter
See 0011987: Create Gramplet for address connected to a person

This is a common theme in enhancement requests gramplets that render ā€œfull treeā€ statistics. (For Top Surnames, Age Stats or Surname Cloud) Is there a standard way to upgrade a ā€œDeashboardā€ Gramplet to be filtered gramplet in other Categories?

Background: my tree has nearly 100 k individuals and some 7500 locations. So a gramplet that uses the complete database is virtually useless. To use only the locations that are linked to the active person would propably be a sensible approach.

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I agree. Thereā€™s been discussion of adding an over-arching filter to Dashboards too. But that will require diverting resources away from the new releases.

Adding a Filter in the Gramplet Configuration seems more ā€˜doableā€™.

References:

Top priority must be to teach Gramps how to work with modern database backends and to leverage their power. Everything else is a distraction and a waste of resources. Just my opinion :wink:

There are people at various skill levels who want to contribute.

Many (most) have no ability to contribute at that level. So they can nibble away at other priorities.

And working on priorities serially wastes the true power of open source development ā€¦ the ability to apply and flood small resources everywhere. The core team must have focused direction. The peripheral resources can do their own things.

Honestly I donā€™t agree with your statement (because at the end of the day, everything in life must be prioritized in one way or another), but I see your point. As long as the core team is focused on the important goals (the priorities), Iā€™m happy with what the ā€œperipheral resourcesā€ (interesting term BTW) are spending their unprioritized time :wink:

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