Family Historian User Group

I have been having great fun adding icons to my charts (thank you Jackson Eagleson of GenealogyReviews on YouTube for drawing my attention to what can be achieved here).

Essentially, as those already in the know will understand, it is possible to use the Boxes section of Diagram Options to add conditions through use of expressions, which result in icons being added automatically underneath boxes in diagrams. For example, someone born in England could have a Union Jack flag automatically displayed underneath their box on the chart. This enables all kinds of trends and patterns to be tracked visually, and really it is quite marvellous.

Like many others no doubt, I have multiple countries in which people were born and died. This requires multiple conditions being entered. It is very handy to be able to copy one condition's expression, paste it into a new condition's expression, and tweak it, before adding a new icon. It is also handy to be able to rearrange the priority of conditions (so that icons appear in a particular order (e.g. birth place on the left, death place on the right, and events in between in the middle, in the right order).

The trouble is that the visibility of the conditions is poor, because the list of conditions is displayed in a very small space. I have so many conditions now (and growing and growing) that I have to hunt down the right condition to copy by using the edit button, so as to open the edit screen, in which I can see the full expression, to make sure it's the right one to copy. This applies to reordering too. I have to know the position of the item I want to move and the item I want to move it next to, and in order to check those current positions I have to open items in the edit screen. In either case if I get it wrong the first time I have to try, try again, resulting potentially in opening the edit screen up several times.

All these inconveniences could be solved if it were to be possible to expand the Diagram Options box. At the moment it has a fixed size - no drag handles appear when you hover over the edges. Of course the box in which the conditions are listed would need to expand as the Diagram Options box expands. That way you would be able to see the whole function in each case, not just the beginning of it in each case, and you would be able to have a "taller" list (at the moment the box only shows 6-7 conditions, and you have to scroll to see the rest of them), which would enable you to take in the whole list (or a much larger part of the whole list) in one glance, without the need to scroll.

I believe that that might be a simple programming fix (type of container - expandable or fixed).

That alone would assist me (and I would hope others) mightily.

Another connected improvement would be the following, which I appreciate might not be so straightforward to implement. At the moment, when you click on a condition, its associated icon appears in the Feature box below. That is helpful, but you have to keep clicking different conditions to see each condition's icon. There is no way to pick out a condition from all of the others by just looking. You have to keep clicking. Therefore it would be a great help if the icons were to appear in the conditions table, i.e. a new column after Priority, containing the relevant icon in each row. That would make for very easy identification of the right condition(s) at one glance.

I hope these suggestions find favour.

In any event I am enjoying FH enormously, and through using it I am gaining new insights in terms of trends and other information that do not leap off of the page in other programs.

Yes I totally agree with this and would support and vote for it on the wish list.

The request has been very cogently expressed so I don't think I have any to add to it as it stands. However, I have always thought it would be handy if the expressions could be named/titled in the Boxes section, so not only could the expression be seen as described above, but a title could act as a reminder for what the expression does (some of mine are quite complex and it can take a minute to work out what it is doing!) So if possible I would ask for a Name to be added to the expressions too.

What about the other Box Features apart from Icons?
i.e. Box Fill colour, Box Shape, Box Shadow, etc?
Should they also somehow be represented in a column against each Condition?

The thread Please Read Before Posting Wishes (6176) at the top of this Forum ask you to check if a Wish List item already exists, which you have not done.
Wish List Ref 218 ReSize Diagram Options Box has existed since 2012 but has not attracted many Votes. Nobody has Voted since 2016, so this is your chance!

With all respect to the posting made by Jane, I doubt anyone goes trawling through the whole arcane wish list looking to see if a request has already been made, especially not new users to the Forum. Stalwarts like yourself may remember these requests coming up at the time, but I doubt very few others do and hence the subject is broached as a new post to test the waters. It's great that there is already a wish list item for this, thank you for pointing it out. I'm not sure what the yardstick is for "not many votes" but it would appear to me that only the first screen (of 10) has anything like more than a few votes, and considering some of them (like making a box expandable) would be very simple programming, it appears CP don't really take it seriously anyway. But I guess this has all been discussed before, and I'm wandering off topic.

ADC65 wrote: ↑

26 Mar 2023 21:58

With all respect to the posting made by Jane, I doubt anyone goes trawling through the whole arcane wish list looking to see if a request has already been made, especially not new users to the Forum. Stalwarts like yourself may remember these requests coming up at the time, but I doubt very few others do and hence the subject is broached as a new post to test the waters.

Stalwarts don't remember every item on the Wish List. We use the search facility. Limit the scope to Diagrams and search for 'resize'. A single item appears to trawl through. Of course, we stalwarts realise that it's much easier for all concerned to have us do the work for you!

It's great that there is already a wish list item for this, thank you for pointing it out. I'm not sure what the yardstick is for "not many votes" but it would appear to me that only the first screen (of 10) has anything like more than a few votes, and considering some of them (like making a box expandable) would be very simple programming, it appears CP don't really take it seriously anyway. But I guess this has all been discussed before, and I'm wandering off topic.

We also realise that nobody reads the pinned post at the top of any forum, including this one: Calico Pie  - Wish List Policy (6175) . The Wish List isn't the only input to Calico Pie's development planning, but it is taken into account. Wish list thoughts (21448) might be the place to continue the discussion if you want to.

tatewise wrote: ↑

26 Mar 2023 19:16

What about the other Box Features apart from Icons?
i.e. Box Fill colour, Box Shape, Box Shadow, etc?
Should they also somehow be represented in a column against each Condition?

The thread Please Read Before Posting Wishes (6176) at the top of this Forum ask you to check if a Wish List item already exists, which you have not done.
Wish List Ref 218 ReSize Diagram Options Box has existed since 2012 but has not attracted many Votes. Nobody has Voted since 2016, so this is your chance!

Thanks Mike for bring the earlier request to my attention. I did do a search before posting, but must not have scrolled back to 2012! I have now added my vote to the 2012 item.

I agree that other attributes such as box fill colour, etc would be a good addition (not just restricting a column to showing icon only).