Family Historian User Group

My father is 80 years of age and not very technically minded. He finds a mobile phone a struggle to use.

So he's asked me to produce a hard-copy of our family tree (currently has 360 people on going back to 1750).

I thought I would just produce a Photobook with images of diagrams, but our tree gets really wide really quickly (families of 10 not uncommon)

If I print these diagrams the images are very wide and the text is too small to read.

This must be a common problem, is there a recommended way to set out a hardcopy of a tree?

I know the best option would be an online navigable tree but he's absolutely adamant he wants a hard copy version.

Any suggestions of how to lay this out?

Many thanks for all suggestions!

Spread the tree across multiple separate charts with cross-references to "See chart No. ...", perhaps?

Welcome to the FHUG.

Could you give us a little more detail about what you have tried.
What type of Diagram are you producing? I suspect an All Relatives Diagram?
What Diagram > Options have you tried adjusting? e.g. Orientation: Left-right may be smaller than Top-down.
How much detail do you need in each box? e.g. Would just Name & Life Dates be enough? Do you need photos in each box?
e.g.
Diagram > Options > Text tab, Text Scheme: Name, Dates
Diagram > Options > Pictures tab, Preference: None

I produce the diagram in PDF format then send it to a company called My History Limited to print it out. https://www.my-history.co.uk/acatalog/P ... ml#SID=519 Their service has so far been lightning fast. (I am sure there are competitors.) I have sometimes had to play around with the diagram options to make sure it will fit onto their various sizes of paper and keep the costs down. I prefer to use the Charts - More Diagrams - Ancestors Generation Colouring format as it is prettier than the standard ones and some folks have found it easier to read than the standard ones.

Hope this helps.

I assume you already know that FH can print out the tree on as many A4 pages as needed, and you can sellotape them together? The text is then full size. To see the page boundaries on your tree click the Page icon which should be on the second line of icons at the top of the screen. You will need to shrink the screen size to see how many pages there are. And when you Save the Diagram as a PDF choose the option Use Current Page Layout, so it will save it as separate pages.

I have had various charts printed through a company called My History.co.uk who are very helpful, fast & efficient. Go on to their chart page & upload your tree. You are able to view & edit until you are satisfied before actually purchasing.

Not sure if my experience will help you but here goes!
My Aunt who is 103 was very interested in her husband's family tree and as I had all the data collected in my FH database I produced a FH booklet with most of it in it. A little bit of tinkering I was also able to include a multipage Tree, it just needed sticky back plastic to make the Tree a pull out to ultra wide document

I recently put together a number of charts for my family. In an early 2020/21 FHUG post there was information about the use of FH and PDF Creator. Producing the charts was accomplished by printing to PDFCreator (free!) from FH.

As part of PDFCreator, the size of the desired page can be specified and the FH content scaled to fit. The resolution can be adjusted to manage the file size. The limitations of PDFCreator limits the chart size to about 5000 pixels by 5000 pixels (effectively about 5m x 5m). Having created the chart, the PDF file can still be edited with PDFCreator or Adobe Acrobat for minor changes.

In my project I created an all relatives chart that has over 1600 people and spanned 14 generations. For this chart, I set the page size to the A0 portrait height so that the file could be printed on any commercial plan printer with a width (length) of about 4.5 metres - many local printing services have such printers. Setting up the file required the chart to be scaled to fit the paper size (the height dimension in this case) but I also increased the print resolution to 600 to keep the details easily visible. When the completed PDF is opened on a computer, the reader can zoom in and clearly read the details of any part at an individual level.

Using this tool set, the options for printing charts are virtually limitless - the intended use and application will determine the formats actually used.

Thank you for all the suggestions. Getting a large scale chart printed on 42" paper sounds like a good plan!

The issue I had was I was trying to include ALL the information I've gathered, and when I printed this as A4 sheets they were a jigsaw that covered the entire living room floor - no way my Dad will be able to make sense of that.

So I think I need to be a bit more selective.

I've produced a number of charts centred around individuals (with the branch leading back to my Dad still visible for perspective) then put each one on a page of a Photobook.

Each page 'features' someone I've got a decent amount of information/photos for. With just basic information about their ancestors and descendents.

I've decided it's not possible to include everything in a book format, so an additional large chart will help in seeing how each featured individual relates to everyone else.

And I thought gathering the information was the hard part!

Thanks for all the suggestions.

A little tale:

I printed a huge 5m by 2m tree using an all relatives diagram for my Dad's cousins get together, everyone enjoyed looking at it, but the only place I could put it was on the floor of the hall, so the biggest problem was getting all the over 80's people up off the floor once they had added all their great grandchildren to the chart.

In describing what I mean here I am imagining a "descendants" type of Family tree from a Top man.

I used to have an excellent printer which printed on any paper that would fit and I would print on Banner paper which is the size of 3 A4 sheets laid lengthways next to each other. This was great as one could create handy rolls of paper, I haven't been able to find a replacement printer, but I don't think that print shops have a problem with Banner Paper.
You can print a few generations on one sheet, lay it out on a table for someone to see and move around quite easily, lay another sheet below it with the next few generations, roll up the generation above and roll out the next one down if you want to, and of course as you go down the generations you could have a number of rolls and you can roll up a sheet and move to another one on the side too.

For your 80 year old's link to the top man, as it were, you could print the relationship vertically on the banner paper.