YellowOnline 0 Report post Posted August 22, 2010 (edited) 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 August 22, 2010 by YellowOnline Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Virginia Blakelock 0 Report post Posted August 22, 2010 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 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
YellowOnline 0 Report post Posted August 22, 2010 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 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
RobinL 0 Report post Posted August 22, 2010 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. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
YellowOnline 0 Report post Posted August 23, 2010 (edited) 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 August 23, 2010 by YellowOnline Share this post Link to post Share on other sites