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Archiver > GENCMP > 2001-03 > 0985208593


From: "Ciarán Ó Duibhín" <>
Subject: Re: An interactive tree?
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 21:03:13 -0000
References: <9816a4$154$1@news5.svr.pol.co.uk>, <3AB53803.431E7D2B@sdf.sdf.ss>, <vHht6.38575$386.1465948@news.chello.at>


Thanks to all who responded on this, and apologies in advance for what has
turned into quite a long post.

GenoPro

GenoPro was the most interesting thing suggested to me (thanks to Istvan).
It enables me to make satisfying charts without too much trouble, though
not by the technique I suggested. GenoPro makes a chart from the entire
database, and then it works like a clever graphic editor: you delete and
rearrange, using an intuitive and fairly easy interface. You can print and
save the chart.

GenoPro doesn't, as far as I can see, allow insertion of individuals (from
the database) on the chart being edited. So if you have deleted someone
whom you later decide should be included after all, it looks to me like you
have to start from the whole chart again. The interface is as good as I can
imagine for the technique of selecting and moving or deleting bits of a
chart. But I would hope that, with the technique I suggest, such manual
selection and moving would not be necessary at all.

I have a couple of minor problems with GenoPro, though I haven't studied it
thoroughly, so I may still be missing something. One is to do with accented
characters in names - acute-accented characters, for example, appear as a
small-a-circumflex followed by the unaccented letter. Also, an automatic
pruning option which I would find useful would be "select direct
descendents, plus their spouses" - it looks as though I can select direct
descendents, but then have to go around spotting the spouses and adding them
to the selection, before deleting the unselected parts of the chart.

Anyone thinking of using GenoPro should be aware that the *free* version
will tell you, during setup, that it will "install advertising to your web
browser". If you proceed with the setup, this means that you will soon find
your browser window showing advertising links to a site called "web3000" on
places like the title bar and on the status bar. This advertising is how
the author is able to offer GenoPro for free, but it is annoying, to say the
least, to see this stuff every time you run your browser. It can be
removed, we are told, either by uninstalling the free GenoPro, or by buying
an upgrade to GenoPro Plus. (I haven't done either yet, but I probably will
soon do one of them.)

My own suggestion - again!

Can I briefly recap on my own suggestion for a program to produce tailored
charts from a database? Rather than start from a chart of the whole
database, which can be overwhelming, I would start from something smaller,
like the ancestor chart of an individual, the descendent chart of an
individual (to include the spouses of descendents), or the minimal chart
necessary to show the relationship between two individuals (to include only
persons directly descended from the common ancestor, plus spouses of such
persons - not, therefore, ancestors or siblings of those spouses). One or
other of these starting points would generally be close to what I want when
I need a chart.

Now, the "atoms" out of which any chart is built are families: father,
mother and children. An atom consisting of a person without spouse or
children is trivial to chart, so I won't digress on it. In any chart, such
as the starting charts suggested above, I would display the atoms with at
least the father and mother; but we might find the children of a particular
atom being shown in full, or just one being shown, or none being shown.

The *only* manual editing operation would be to change the display of a
selected atom - most importantly, by changing which children are displayed
(also, less significantly, by hiding/showing a spouse). Although simple,
this is a powerful operation: each new child displayed - with spouse, if
there is one in the database - introduces another atom into the chart; no
children of this atom would be displayed initially, but it could in turn be
expanded by another use of the operation. For each child removed from the
display by this editing operation, their spouses and descendents would
disappear too - though all could be restored at any later time by re-editing
the display of this atom.

I would be hopeful that the layout of the chart could be automatically
calculated after an edit of an atom, possibly through a depth-first complete
redisplay. Multiple marriages could be a problem. Things would obviously
be simpler if we constrained the chart so that at most one child of a
marriage could have their spouse's ancestors shown, but such restrictions
are not nice.

Some other ideas regarding the display of an atom: When the children of an
atom are not (or not all) displayed, there should be some iconic hint of how
many children are not displayed. There should probably also be some iconic
hint of any other (undisplayed) marriages of either parent of an atom. There
might be some user control over the personal details displayed for each
individual, though here the default selection of details by GenoPro and the
concise manner of their depiction would be hard to improve on.

Like GenoPro, this could be a free-standing program operating on a GEDCOM
file; or it could be a menu suboption ("Make Chart"?) to a complete
genealogy program. Like GenoPro again, it would allow printing and saving
(and saving as an image file?) of edited charts. I would not see it being
allowed to edit the database, or to enter and display anything which is not
in the database.

TreeDraw and others

I ought also to mention some other items of software. TreeDraw, from
Spansoft, is very similar in concept to GenoPro, and a few points of
comparison may be useful. TreeDraw too is a graphic editor for charts, and
can take its input from a GEDCOM file, but I found it a bit difficult to
work with. It has one advantage, that you start with a chart which is
smaller than the whole database - it can be the ancestor tree of an
individual, or the descendent tree (with spouses!), but this turns into a
disadvantage if you can't include anyone else from the database in your
chart, and I don't think you can - as with GenoPro, it seems that you start
with a chart on which you can only delete or move.

I've also looked at full genealogy programs with innovative ways of
displaying the database - including Kith & Kin Pro, and 3D Family Tree - but
I'm not looking for unconventional layouts, I'm concerned with producing
charts to print, in conventional tree layout. For my main genealogy program
I'm happy with Cumberland Family Tree, which is unadventurous about
displaying trees, but its GEDCOM export facility allows me to shove the data
into things like GenoPro.

I remain interested in reading other angles on this.

Ciarn Duibhn.












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