chart: genealogical charts in PostScript

This archive contains a LifeLines report generator, chartrep, that produces input for a C program, called chart, that produces genealogical descendant charts in PostScript. The frontend program charline may be used to call LifeLines and chartrep. Large charts may be broken into tiles for printing by chartile.

See also the examples and the files INSTALL, CHANGES, and MANIFEST.

This is version 6.1 of chart. It includes several major features that do not appear in any other genealogical chart drawing program, including:

• Folding text lines in person boxes to adjust the shape of a chart and thus use as large a point size as possible.
• Trimming, to show just people in certain genealogical lines.
• Stopping, before or with a person, or with the person's children.
• Intermarriages, including intergenerational intermarriages.
• Thickets of multiple ancestors, not just trees.
• Cohorts, or automatically generated thickets of multiple ancestors.

To use, run lines on a LifeLines database and tell it to generate a report with chartrep. Tell chartrep the person, number of generations, and an output file name, such as sarjeant.tree. You can use charline to do all these things.

For example:

charline -db sarjeant -o sarjeant.tree -a 'Thomas Leo /Sarjeant/'

Then run chart on the output:

chart sarjeant.tree > sarjeant.ps

For more about how to use chart, see the manual pages charline(1), chart(1), and chartile(1).

The report generator is adapted from one written by Dick Knowles, and one of the example charts uses his data, in acknowledgement. The chart program itself is entirely the work of John S. Quarterman.

Let me know what you think of the program and what you would like to see.

There is a mailing list for discussion of chart, chart@quarterman.org. To subscribe, send mail to chart-request@quarterman.org.