1/6/2024 What's important to you (the user)

[Neriderc]

It would be good to hear what features are important to anyone using GVExport, to help prioritise the order that things are added.

Feel free to mention existing issues that you'd like prioritised, or to suggest things that have not yet been mentioned.

Small things or big things are welcome. You can comment on little things that annoy you, options you wish you had, or big features on your wish list.

[schuco]

GVExport is able to display very complicated relationships between family branches. Sometimes, however, the diagrams become very confusing. I find it particularly annoying when Graphviz places person boxes between siblings in a family to save space. I think that it is hardly possible to "prevent" Graphviz, as a general program that is not specialized in genealogy, from doing this. However, I have seen that Graphviz can also display 3D graphics in VRML format. I have no idea and am asking quite naively whether it would be possible to move the annoying boxes that have been inserted into sibling groups for reasons of space to a lower level. Then, however, it should still be possible to display the 3D graphics without special 3D glasses or software.

[Neriderc]

GVExport is able to display very complicated relationships between family branches. Sometimes, however, the diagrams become very confusing. I find it particularly annoying when Graphviz places person boxes between siblings in a family to save space. I think that it is hardly possible to "prevent" Graphviz, as a general program that is not specialized in genealogy, from doing this.

I also don't much like how Graphviz sometimes groups people. In the past I have investigated trying to resolve this, and the options seem to be 1. to increase the weighting for some links ("edges", in DOT terms), which I've found to give me inconsistent results that I can't claim are any better, or option 2, use groupings to effectively force items to appear together. However, you can't just do groups but have to actually assign the row/column for the group. In doing this, we lose the advantage of Graphvix handling this for us. We simply do not know where particular groups should fall before we have traversed the tree. It just isn't practical to use this method as we lose a major reason for using Graphviz to start with.

However, I have seen that Graphviz can also display 3D graphics in VRML format. I have no idea and am asking quite naively whether it would be possible to move the annoying boxes that have been inserted into sibling groups for reasons of space to a lower level. Then, however, it should still be possible to display the 3D graphics without special 3D glasses or software.

I think the problem doesn't go away with this, because we aren't telling Graphviz to insert non-siblings in the middle of siblings, so we can't really change our input to tell it which boxes to put on another layer.

I have thought about this a bit, and even if we did find a way to force group siblings, I don't think we would want that. Sometimes the siblings each have hundreds of descendants in the tree and should be spaced far apart to allow this to fit.

Most family tree software only lists descendants or ancestors of a specific person. We are trying to display all information in the family tree, even if they aren't a direct ancestor or descendant, and sometimes even if they are not related except distantly through marriage. Have you seen other software that manages to do this and do a good job of it? It would be good to see some inspiration.

[schuco]

@Neriderc Have you seen other software that manages to do this and do a good job of it?

I have not and that is the reason why I like and use GVExport.
Thank you that you are again open for any ideas, even diletantic ones like mine, to further improve this great tool!
As you say, let us wait to see some inspiration of others

[elysch]

Hello all.

The lines are hard to follow when GVExport generates a big diagram. It would be great to use different kinds of lines in a random manner (kinds of dashes or dots or widths, I don't know). This way not all the lines look the same.
[https://graphviz.org/docs/attr-types/style/](Graphviz style)

I guess it wouldn't be easy to do and I'm not sure if it would look weird.

What do you think?

[Neriderc]

The lines are hard to follow when GVExport generates a big diagram. It would be great to use different kinds of lines in a random manner

It seems it's not too difficult to do. I just did a little trial:

I know this isn't a big complicated diagram so might be hard to really judge if it helps, but let me know what you think.

[elysch]

It looks ok to me... I can test it if you tell me what to change.

[Neriderc]

I've just pushed my changes to the "random-lines" branch, so if you download that you can test it out. It's only a quick change, there is no option to disable the setting yet! If it looks like what you're after then I can add the option to the UI and all that ancillary stuff.

[elysch]

Maybe something is missing?. I tried it and all lines look the same as before.

[Neriderc]

Oh sorry, I hadn't committed the changes! I have done it now, so it should work if you try again.

[elysch]

I don't know what others think, but I liked it very much.

💯

[Neriderc]

I'll make a new issue to track this and add it as an option 🙂

[elysch]

Another idea. To show a message with the number of individuals and families when you generate a download file and add it to the list of messages. Just like when you click on the "View" button. That way there is no need to view before download to know this information.

[Neriderc]

That should be easy enough to do, I'll make a new issue to track that as well.