Diagrams are laid out, apparently dictated by the positioning given to the youngest generation, resulting in siblings of older generations being widely separated.
Can an override of the default be included in the dimesions options, along with option to set
1. space between spouses (max), 2. space between siblings (max) 3. space between cousins (max)
ID:350
* Diagram dimesions
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Jane
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Diagram dimesions
Children are placed below parents. In your request I presume you do not want them to be?
Diagram dimesions
I am interested in diagrams and also discovered this. I call it the 'stacked hay rake problem'. The problem arises because the siblings of each family are like the prongs of rake and, if the sibilngs have their own set of children, you can't fit their hay racks without extending the width of the parent rake.
Looking at it like this you can see that putting a maximum separation will not work unless you allow something to give. I see four possibilities:
1. The FH software could be modified to make the boxes smaller as you go to descendant generations. This would have a limit when the boxes become so small that the font needed could not be read. Alternatively the bigboxes/ font in the higher generations might look unpleasing to the eye. However, I do think that a small amount of size adjustment - by a factor of 2 or may be 3 would be a great help.
2. You can produce the chart as at present, copy it as a bitmap and then edit it with an image editor to move blocks of the family around so that not all of one generation is on the same level. This increases the height of the chart, but often makes better overall proportions; I find most charts tend to be wide and not very high because of all those hay rakes end to end. The disadvantage of this is of course the work needed by hand. The image editing is quite easy, even the Paint ((5.1) program in windows XP (under Start, All Programs, Accessories) can do the job. You just cut and paste blocks, rub out unused lines and add new connection lines. I was using this with my old genealogical software before I bought FH. I bought FH because it would do a much better job on diagrams before I had to get down to hand crafting the tree image.
3... and this is were my angle on the wish comes in. It would be really useful if one could have expansion buttons between the sibling bar and the each child. One could then choose to switch off children one did not wish to show. One of my great grandparent families had 16 children of whom 4 died in infancy. A little empty tick on the sibling bar for these and those without descendants would allow the remaining children to come closer together. As well as sometimes alleviating the problem this also enables one to make diagrams which focus more clearly on where the 'action' is - useful for some communications.
4. FH does offer an easy, neat way of partially achieving suggestion 3. Split your tree using a named list or query to select just those people you really need to plot. Then diagram the split gedcom. Unfortunately this will not have the tick marks for the suppressed children, so I either add them with an image editor, or else make a note in a title box.
I am sorry to have gone on a bit but the problem interests me and I would like to hear of any other solutions.
Looking at it like this you can see that putting a maximum separation will not work unless you allow something to give. I see four possibilities:
1. The FH software could be modified to make the boxes smaller as you go to descendant generations. This would have a limit when the boxes become so small that the font needed could not be read. Alternatively the bigboxes/ font in the higher generations might look unpleasing to the eye. However, I do think that a small amount of size adjustment - by a factor of 2 or may be 3 would be a great help.
2. You can produce the chart as at present, copy it as a bitmap and then edit it with an image editor to move blocks of the family around so that not all of one generation is on the same level. This increases the height of the chart, but often makes better overall proportions; I find most charts tend to be wide and not very high because of all those hay rakes end to end. The disadvantage of this is of course the work needed by hand. The image editing is quite easy, even the Paint ((5.1) program in windows XP (under Start, All Programs, Accessories) can do the job. You just cut and paste blocks, rub out unused lines and add new connection lines. I was using this with my old genealogical software before I bought FH. I bought FH because it would do a much better job on diagrams before I had to get down to hand crafting the tree image.
3... and this is were my angle on the wish comes in. It would be really useful if one could have expansion buttons between the sibling bar and the each child. One could then choose to switch off children one did not wish to show. One of my great grandparent families had 16 children of whom 4 died in infancy. A little empty tick on the sibling bar for these and those without descendants would allow the remaining children to come closer together. As well as sometimes alleviating the problem this also enables one to make diagrams which focus more clearly on where the 'action' is - useful for some communications.
4. FH does offer an easy, neat way of partially achieving suggestion 3. Split your tree using a named list or query to select just those people you really need to plot. Then diagram the split gedcom. Unfortunately this will not have the tick marks for the suppressed children, so I either add them with an image editor, or else make a note in a title box.
I am sorry to have gone on a bit but the problem interests me and I would like to hear of any other solutions.
Diagram dimesions
My preference, rather than the current default, would be to have each family group of siblings together with their cousins' family group of siblings not too distantly separted from them. Mutiple marriages would have all spouses close to their partner.Children are placed below parents. In your request I presume you do not want them to be?
The consequences of this type of control would be
a) a more tightly grouped tree
b) children would be unlikely to be directly under their parents (a factor I regard as of lower importance than being able see at a glance all the siblings of one generation together), but the prime purpose of the lines between the generations is to act as a visual link, so it should not be a major hinderance to follow family lines.
C) If children are not directly beneath their parents, then it is likely there will need to be a slightly greater space between generations to accomodate the connecting family lines.
As I originally said, I would like this as a user override option, so that the current would remain as the automatic default.