In consultation with @emyoulation, the original thread about FamilyTreeView (FTV) has been split at the v0.1.65 anouncement due to the thread’s length (>330 comments). The discussion can be continued here.
The addon seems to work, but should not be considered stable yet. Please back up your data before using this addon.
You can find the source code of the FamilyTreeView addon on Github. There, you can also find installation instructions.
I haven’t been very active online the last few weeks, but I continued to work on the customizable boxes to add a new dimension of flexibility to FamilyTreeView. I finally implemented everything I had on my todo list for this feature and fixed all the bugs. (The user interface (config window) was by far the most difficult part for me.) The new feature is available in v0.1.65 of FamilyTreeView.
With this new feature, the user can change the width of the boxes and choose what information to display in the person and family boxes. There are 4 predefined definitions: Minimal, Compact, Regular, Detailed. You cannot change them, but you can make a copy of them and then modify (and rename) the copy. The predefined definitions may change in the future, as they should provide a useful default set of options to choose from. I’m open to suggestions for improving the predefined box definitions.
Only advanced users should feel the need to create a custom definition, which is also possible with this new update. You could create different definitions for the boxes for different use cases, e.g. for working on the tree, for browsing the tree, or for printing the visualization of FTV.
The following item types are available. They can be added to the boxes once or multiple times. The order of the items can be customized:
- Image (also for family boxes, or avatar if no image is available, flexibility requested by @SNoiraud here and @hamkg here)
- Name (also for family boxes, i.e. the names of the spouses separated by a dash)
- Alternative name (person boxes only)
- Birth or fallback (person boxes only)
- Death or fallback (person boxes only)
- Birth and death or fallbacks (person boxes only, useful for “1855 - 1911”)
- Marriage or fallback (family boxes only)
- Divorce or fallback (family boxes only)
- Marriage and divorce or fallback (family boxes only)
- Any other event type (person and family boxes, see below for details)
- Relationship calculated based on the active person or home person (person boxes only) [added in v0.1.68]
- Attributes (person and family boxes)
- Gender (person boxes only)
- Relationship type (family boxes only)
- Gramps ID (person and family boxes)
- Tags (person and family boxes, see below for details)
- There is also a “gutter” item type that adds empty space of customizable size to visually separate other elements in the boxes.
- … (I’m open to your suggestions for item types you’re missing. Also, I plan to implement extensibility, similar to the badges, so everyone can code their own box item types.)
For images, you can set the size of the image.
For all text based items, you can select individually how many lines should be reserved/used for this item. Example: Select more lines if you don’t want names to be abbreviated, if you want full place/descriptions to be displayed or you display an attribute which typically has a long text. (Note that you can also increase the width of the person box if a box gets too tall.) Or, select fewer lines if you want a compact visualization.
For all events (or fallbacks) you have the following options:
- The event type you want to display (only for "event"items: death, burrial, occupation, etc.)
- How to display the type of the event: name of the event type, a symbol, no indication of the event type, onyl display the event type (name or symbol) if there is no other information to be displayed.
- Which event to show if there are multiple (e.g. first, second or last occupation)
- Display the date of the event (full date or just the year)
- Display the place of the event (requested by @hamkg here; There is also a new option to set the place format on the Apearence page (requested by @DaveSch here))
- Display the description of the event
- Display the tags of the event
There are different visualization methods for tags (of persons or families, but also for the tags of events):
- Display only the colors of the tags
- You can optionally combine tags of the same color (with or without showing the number of tags with that color).
- Display only the name of the tag
- Display the name and color of the tag
If the name of a tag is not displayed, the color is visualized by a colored circle. If the name is displayed, the background of the text has the tag’s color and the text color is black or white (depending on the contrast).
Besides the obvious enhancement by adding customizability, with this update FTV also measures the line height of the current font on the current screen. I’m quite optimistic that this is a more robust approach than the previous method of computing/guessing the line height based on the ppi. I hope this will fix the issues on high dpi/ppi screens (e.g. @Woody, @roptat). Hopefully this will also fix the font issues reported by @SNoiraud here. I’m looking forward to feedback from those who had suboptimal display prior to this update.
Currently there are the following limitations and possible improvements to the new feature:
- The user interface for configuring the box contents is not yet perfect.
- All items are in one column, so you cannot put items next to each other, e.g. the image next to the other content. I have this on my list, but the config user interface for the current customizability is already quite complex (~1000 lines of code just for the UI, >60% of new lines in this update).
Since this is a big update and adds a lot of flexibility, I can’t test all possibilities and use cases. Feel free to give me feedback and suggestions to further improve this feature.
FamilyTreeView (FTV) version 0.1.65 (or newer) available by adding the 
