Thinking outside the box

[Virginia Blakelock 0]

 

Before and after shots of a chart experimenting with Mike's idea for spouse boxes - eliminating the connector lines. In this example I made the spouses a lighter shade, and used dark-gray lines throughout.

 

Also notice my error - forgetting to check 'Place Preposition: Blank' on the Data Types tab - so I would not get the 'at' when the field was empty.

 

And maybe Robin will explain how to make a perfectly smooth circle - mine is squiggly.

 

Virginia

[RobinL 0]

And maybe Robin will explain how to make a perfectly smooth circle - mine is squiggly.

 

Virginia

 

 

Virginia,

 

VCF is not a perfect graphic drawing engine. It produces graphics on the screen as pixel that is set as part of an object or it is not set. With drawing a circle at 96dpi, there will always be a staircase edge more obvious in in smaller diameter circles. Try creating circle with a thicker line and and the look at the view at 100% and 800% zoom see the difference in the rendering. So there is nothing you can do to improve this "wobbly" effect. A screen grab will show this effect, whereas chart output to PDF may not - it depends on the rendering resolution.

 

This effect is in contrast with other graphic drawing packages like photoshop, etc. These packages don't just use pixels of the one (user-defined colour) but add other colours (between the circle colour and the background colour) into the step spaces the give the eye the impression of a smoother outline.

 

Personally, I don't find this as much of problem compared with the inanbility to produce non-sold line types that can be printed thicker and hence seen at a distance on a large chart.

[Mike Talbot 0]

Thanks to Virginia’s tutorials, color box fill can always be use to clarify relationships.

However, when eliminating spousal connector lines and color fill is not used (or even if it is), two techniques can be used for clarification. Descendant and spouse boxes can touch or even overlap. Spouse boxes should also be offset from descendant boxes. An added benefit of offsetting spouse boxes from descendant boxes is that all descendants in a generation can be separately group selected from spouses using the shift-key/draw-rectangle method and vice-versa.

 

When there are multiple spouses and the genealogical complexities do not allow all spouse boxes to touch, different colored or gray-scale connector lines can be used to differentiate social from biological relationships.

 

The attached composite chart on Albert Einstein’s family shows the results of using these recommendations. Note: components of Elsa Einstein’s descendant chart were copied to Albert’s chart, then moved to the desired location.

 

Best wishes,

 

Mike Talbot.

 

PS: You may need to use full-screen view mode to scroll to the bottom of the attached chart.