My procedure is to designate a start person, e.g. me if I want all my relatives, and have a look at the tree. As I said, this will give all my ascendants, descendants and their spouses. I then add my remotest ancestor. But this has the drawback that descending trees can be really huge with many connectors crossing due to implexes and generation duration difference on various lines.
Regarding my patch, what is your skill in manually installing software? I can send you the whole source directory which you can install in parallel with your “official” version. But there are many caveats because it is experimental. In particular, I am not on the same DB version as the official releases. This means you must import your database into my Gramps and not use it against your existing DBs otherwise they are irremediably damaged.
I may not have been clear. My patch does not collect all person in the DB, it saves the settings for the report(s) so that next time you reload these settings without the pain to enter them again. Thus, you can incrementally converge over full DB coverage. But, once again, I don’t recommend it if your DB contains more than 1000 people. I remember having drawn a chart with 500-600 persons and it was unusable, though it was 2.5 m long and 10 generations wide. The connectors tended to merge and couldn’t tell where they exited the crossing because their angles were too small.
We can continue the discussion on private mail.
I managed to dirty-hack a quick workaround to get all IDs inserted in the Family Line Graph wizard. Don’t throw and on me, please … it is really awful. I share my hack nevertheless - I am sure someone with insides in the program can come up with a well architectured implementation.
The resulting visualization looks pretty satisfying. Here is a tiny screenshot so you get an impression.
This is the kind of graph I got. But there are not that many persons in it. When you are in the 100s, it is less readable and in the 1000s unusable.
Yes, I believe so. At some point of complexity it becomes really difficult for the algorithm to “normalize” the “tree”.
Still, it would be a nice addition to the report to easily add all people. Projects with less people in the database might be very satisfied with the result.
Great to see people customizing and sharing their customizations.
Good work!
How many people are in that graph?
Currently, 213 people if I did not miss out someone.
Can I somehow influence at which resolution (quality) images are embedded in PDF file exported by the Familiy Line Graph addon? I found that I can choose between Normal
and Large
thumbnails size. Is there anything else to ensure that images are printed in the best quality?
Both my main family research trees (mine and my partners) have over 3000 people in them. Drawing “the whole tree” is not possible or useful.
This is not due to limitations of imagination or ability to code. Indeed, even some tiny trees are not possible to draw without the lines crossing (“Don’t cross the beams!”).
If we imagine a family (F1) with 3 children, each of whom marry children from other families (F2, F3, F4), that tiny little tree is enough to make drawing a “nice” diagram impossible.
As you can see from the picture, we can arrange the first son (F1-C1) to be married on the left, married to a daughter (F2-C3). Easy. We are now forced to put the next family (F3) and the bride (F3-C1) on the right of F1, and again, the marriage to son F1-C3 fits nicely.
But now we need to draw the marriage of the third child, F1-C2, to (one of) the daughters from F4, and he’s trapped inside the lines for his brothers C1 and C3.
(note - this problem would arise even if F2,F3,F4 only had 1 child each).
BugBear
I agree - but crossed lines are acceptable to a certain degree in my opinion. For my number of people Family Line Graph does a pretty good job of balancing the tree.
There might be more sophisticated graph algorithms. I did some research these days. The only other visualization project I found is the following. I am sure there is more if one invest a bit time to look for them.
- Semantic Web Genealogical Trees (source code, example)
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