I’ve been building a family tree on Gramps for quite some time now. Something that seems pretty important is that when it comes to sharing the genealogy information with other people, to include descendants, printed reports become important. Therefore, I’ve just started to try and produce reports that can be printed. It looks like I can use large format paper such as what my photo printer supports which is also very desirable.
One thing I’m finding is that the reports feature is quite complex and understanding the effect of all of the options is difficult. At this point I’ve been working primarily on Graphs and it appears that what is referred to as Reports → Graphs → Family Lines, whatever that means, is something I like. When first doing this, with minimal changes to the default settings I noticed that for ancestors the married couples are included but as the graph extends to prior generations the parents for females are omitted.
I can find nothing in the documentation that explains this but do think it matters and would appreciate an explanation. My immediate thinking is that this could be necessary based on the total number generations/people involved and might not be a problem if it can be controlled in such a way that another graph could be created that included those left out. If that is possible I could use some help figuring out how that might be done.
Furthermore, it does seem like when making such graphs it might be helpful if there were an option that allows the number of generations to be included in a given report could be specified. If that is possible it is also something I can not figure out how to do.
Have you investigated the output you get when you click:
Reports | Graphical Reports | Descendant Lines… including the numerous options in the many tabs in that report’s dialog box.
If you output to PDF format then in the print dialog of your PDF viewer there will almost certainly be an option to tile the output across many sheets. You can then cut-and-stick the printed pags into a giant tree.
Another option to investigate is the still in beta but actually very stable addon called FamilyTreeView.
To install that you need to follow the instructions here:
Once you get a view on screen that meets your needs (there are lots of config options) don’t try to use the print option. Instead use the ‘export as SVG’ option and then view and print the .svg file using a suitable application.
I’m not finding any selection identified as “Reports | Graphical Reports | Descendant Lines…”. Maybe you mean “Reports | Graphical Reports | Descendant Tree…”. In my case, I’m wanting a tree that maps the ancestors of a selected individual/couple rather than descendants. In that prior generations rather than subsequent generations. I did try the “Reports | Graphical Reports | Ancestor Tree…” option. However, it did not include as much information about each person which caused me to prefer the “Reports | Graphs | Family Lines Graph…”. While there is an option to specify a limit on the number of people I would think that limiting the number of generations ought to be possible which would fit better with my intentions.
With that said, what about my question? Why exclude females?
When it comes to PDF format, it looks like there is a limit of 72 DPI. Insofar as I’m wanting large format prints (my current photo printer does 19x13 inches) 300 DPI is what would be desired. Therefore at present .png format may be my preference. I’m not familiar with SVG format but will take a look to see if that might be better.
I asked Perplexity to examine the code and help diagnose the problem.
The skipping of Ancestors for female People of Interest was due to the “Try to remove extra people and families” being selected in the Report Options tab.
One of its tests (in the report’s removeuninterestingparents() code) is whether the person of interest shares a surname with a parent. I suspect that, in theory, this is intended to trim out adoptive parent or step-parents families. But it seems to be too aggressive in practice.
So, the recommended workaround is to disable the Try to remove extra people and families option in the Report Options tab
(Test case was “Zieliński, Phoebe Emily (Garner)” from the example.gramps test tree. She was the daughter of Шестаков, George and Daniels, Phoebe.)
I did some testing altering settings to see if I could figure out what is happening.
The report does not automatically drop the female line of ancestors. But I cannot figure out when a line back is dropped.
My best results was to uncheck the Try to remove extra people and families box.
Under the Paper Options, I selected Custom Size, w=36.00, h=96.00, Landscape and all margins 0.25.
Under people of interest, after setting my parents, I set the Limit the number of ancestors to 124. I thought this would limit the generations to 5 (4+8+16+32+64). Alas, the generations were full to the third generation dropping one line (a male line) with additional ancestors. In subsequent generations, a few more lines were dropped. Additional lines went back beyond the 5 generations expected.
Per suggestions by emyoulation and DaveSch, unchecking “Try to remove extra people …” does appear to have a positive affect.
When it comes to printing reports I do have enough people in my Family Tree that I do expect needing to print multiple pages, which would involve producing separate pages for different parts of the Tree. In that, I do not expect Gramps to produce multiple pages that achieve the best possible result. It does seem to me that limiting the number of generations from the selected person/couple would be an obvious way to do that. The option to “Limit the number of ancestors” looks like the only available option that would have the desired effect but it is also a bit more cumbersome than one would think is necessary. I will give it a try.
When it comes to paper size I have thought it is something that matters. However, 36 x 96 is way bigger than I can print. I’d also think that by definition that would be called Portrait orientation with a 3:8 aspect ratio which would be a pretty unusual but I suppose that is a way to confine the printout to some portion of some paper size. I did choose a Custom Paper Size of 13x19 with quarter inch borders, with the intention that portrait orientation might be better for the result I expected, as something that fits my photo printer.
My concern has more to do with the choice of format for the output. I think I saw where .pdf would always be 72 DPI which from my perspective is way to low. My photo printer wants 300 DPI and I think it is always best to do the scaling myself and prevent the need for the printer software to do it. From what I can see choosing .png format is a better fit for me. I am not familiar with Structure Vector Graphics (SVG) format but thought there might be a reason it should be considered. I think that starts with learning about what software is needed to use and possibly edit it.
I once had access to an A0-wide roll-paper printer (i.e. practically unlimited length) and I tried printing my tree (which was much smaller then today). The result is unusable because there are too many people and arrows cross in such a way (small angle) that it is very difficult or impossible to follow the emergent track. The phenomenon is amplified when the arrows link people far away.
My advice then is rather to print many “small range” views of your DB. Depending on the sheet/screen size, I recommend not to exceed 200 people. Make clearly visible the “glue points” (which individuals) between the various sheets.
Ancestor charts are easier to manage than descendant ones but they don’t convey the same message. I can cover up to 12 generations on screen for ancestors, but the readability limit is around 8 generations for descendants.
There is some throttling that might need to be considered here.
I suspect that running some reports that overwhelmed the system. And this inspired author Stéphane Charette to add those loose “limits”.
The Ancestor population growth was probably fairly tame. (Unless there was a huge number of blended families or too many People of Interest.)
But the descendant population could grow wildly. (And we don’t know if how the system fills the nodes of the graph. Whether its transits a generation at a time across all the People of Interest or to the full generational depth for each Person of Interest in sequential order.) But no matter which implementation, a report for use by the general public needs a bailout after evaluating each node.
That’s not relevant because every PDF reader I’ve used has an option in the print dialog to ‘tile large pages’. Using that means you can print on whatever paper you have and then ‘cut and stick’ the output.
