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YellowOnline

Box chart report for all people in the current project

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Seemingly easy question. I'm trying to figure out how to create a box chart that contains each and every individual in my project (yes, I know, it'll be huge). I don't seem to find out how to do it: whether it's decendants only, ancestors only or hour-glass. Quid?

Edited by YellowOnline

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There is no way in TMG / Visual Chartform to do that. There is a good explanation of the subject here.

 

I have moved your message to the Visual Chartform (VCF) forum. If you browse the messages here you will see many references to one-page charts. With these you can make an ancestor chart and then descendant charts for each person in that chart - at least close to what you want and far more practical to print and share.

 

Virginia

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Hmz, I read the article you linked to. I'm a bit disappointed there seems to be no way except for linking different sheets, but that would mean a lot of manual work (1200+ people in the tree). The idea of one big chart was to get some kind of overview because right now I lost it :)

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Just to put this into perspective - I have just done a job that started out as a request for an everyone chart for a project with 1800 persons.

 

The main descendancy tree is created as a 20m (68ft) wide chart 450mm (18in) high. It turned out that this was about 1300 persons. Careful work showed that there were 6 other smaller descendancy trees that could be linked to this to give a coverage of about 1750 persons. By looking at the structure of these trees I identified cut points, dividing the final output into 4 printed sheets each about 3.6m (12ft) across by 600mm (2ft) high. Sheet 1 was the upper 8 generations of the descendant of the main surname, Sheet 2 has 5 separate charts on it, one for each of the 5 smaller branches (generations 9+), sheet 3 is a 6th branch (generation 9+) that entirely fills the 3.6m (12ft) * 600mm (2ft) sheet. The last (4th) sheet is second largest descendancy chart to which 4 other minor descendancy charts were separately produced and pasted and linked into it. Each of these charts can be easily displayed at a family reunion or unrolled on the living room floor or dining table to be viewed.

 

So the issue here is that

- your initial wish does not match the technical capabilities of most printers and

- the result would be impossible to display or view sensibly.

- the result will have many confusing long parallel lines that stretch very long distances.

 

A rule of thumb to be considered is the following: a chart will have a single generation that has the most persons in it. Its is this generation (usually the second to last) that governs the extreme dimension of the chart. I find that in most examples this generation contains 35-40% of all the persons within the chart. For your 1200 person example - about 480 persons. Unless you make the font size unreasonably small then the chart box width + the gap to the next box is likely to be at least 40mm (1.5in). This gives an initial chart size estimate of 480 * 40mm (1.5in) = 19.2m (60ft) .

 

Does all this make sense to you? Is this really what you want to see? Is it really of any value to you?

 

I find it far better for audience comprehension if there are separate traditional compact chart representations of almost self contained parts of the total tree. These parts are then properly cross-linked together to other parts by annotations on the chart sheets. The only time where this becomes more difficult to represent is when there are numerous cases of inter-cousin marriages, or cases where siblings in one family marry siblings in another family, or the same partner is divorced from one family to remarry into another branch.

 

BTW: the largest job that I have had to consider for charting gave an initial estimate of chart width of 91m (302ft) !! It did not proceed in this form.

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I admit the dimensions are rather extreme, but I did not plan to print it - just view it on my screens (which is 4x 1980*1080 so that's huge too). Current VCF size is 6000mm x 500mm by the way.

 

Still, I think a reports like this can be a practical way to see how the persons are distributed in the tree. It's really I view I wanted to use for my research only, not to display for an audience. I understand that in your project, being 20000mm broad, lines got a bit confusing though.

Edited by YellowOnline

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