On several occasions I promised to implement “expanders” to expand the visualized tree by more persons and families. Today I finally fixed the last of several bugs and implemented a config page to customize the expanders. You can try them out in the latest version (v0.1.37). The expanders are small circles with an arrow on or next to the line they control. Clicking them expands or collapses the person and families connected by that line. If there is no expander, there are no other persons/families to expand.
Currently, expanders are implemented for parents/ancestors, children/descendants and other families. I plan to implement them for other/alternative parents of a person as well as children of ancestors (siblings of the active person or ancestors).
I’m not sure if the icons on the expanders are intuitive to everyone. They are intuitive to me, but I’ve been working with them for quite a while (in the HTML/CSS/JS implementation), so maybe I’m just used to them. I can also think of using plus/minus symbols instead of the arrow/chevron.
Feel free to give me feedback on the visualization. I tested quite a few cases that I thought might be problematic and fixed everything I could find. But I’m sure I haven’t thought of all possibilities, so if there are overlapping person boxes or something else looks weird, I’m open to bug reports.
[This paragraph was added later:]
To those who suggested alternatives for the other families: I have seen your suggestion and will consider implementing alternative visualizations based on your suggestions. I just used the visualization I had already implemented and worked on the expanders and their logic.
I’d also like to mention that I’ve reduced the maximum number of generations to be shown initially to 20. This is motivated by the fact that for very large trees it takes quite a while to load the visualization. I even had some strange (memory?) problems when trying to show 100 generations of the royal example tree from @emyoulation’s repo. With the new limit, the view should be much more robust. Maybe I’ll introduce a person limit in the future. Then this value can be increased again.
Note that with the new expanders you can still expand many more generations than the 20, just not for all ancestors with one click, so you will notice if your computer takes more than a few seconds to process everything.
In the config window, you can customize which expanders to show and which to expand (i.e. which corresponding subtrees to show) by default (e.g. other families).
The expanders are a pretty essential feature for me when I just want to browse the tree and look around. I hope this is helpful for some of you as well.
As always, let me know your feedback and bug reports!