Charts

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Charts

Gramps Connect draws three kinds of family tree chart: ancestor and descendant charts, a circular fan chart, and a Generations chart that shows whole sibling rows.

Ancestor and descendant charts

The classic tree layout, going up through a person's ancestors or down through their descendants. Click and drag anywhere on the chart to pan around. It can be exported like the fan chart (see Exporting a chart).

Fan chart

A circular "fan" of a person's ancestors.

Shading by lifespan

An option shades each person's slice by how long they actually lived, so long and short lives are visible at a glance.

More or fewer generations

The status bar has "+" and "−" buttons to grow or shrink how many generations are shown. Shrinking never re-fetches anything, so growing back out is instant.

Names and dates in each wedge

Each wedge shows the person's name with their birth and death dates underneath, as much as fits, each line curved along its ring.

• A name too long for one line splits onto two: given names, then surname.
• Where only one line fits, the given name is kept, since that's what tells generations apart.
• In the narrow wedges of distant generations, the text turns to run outward from the center, fitting far more of each name.

With Flip labels on (the default), text that would otherwise read upside down, in the lower half of the fan or wherever you've rotated it to, is turned to read the right way up.

Rotating the fan

Ctrl+drag (or Cmd+drag) anywhere on the fan, in either shading mode, spins it around its own center, to bring a particular branch to the top.

• Hold Shift as well to turn it in 15° steps.
• A drag released within a few degrees of upright lands exactly upright.
• While the fan is turned, a small compass button in its top-right corner shows which way it's pointing. Click it to spin the fan smoothly back to its original orientation.

Generations chart

The Generations chart shows a person's parents and their full sibling row, including half, step and adopted siblings, which the ordinary ancestor chart has no room to show. A horizontal divider marks the boundary between generations.

Besides the scrollbars, you can click and drag anywhere on the diagram to pan it, as on the other charts.

Expanding and folding

A "+" keeps expanding outward. A full sibling row appears at every generation you expand to, not just the person you started from.

A muted gray "−" appears next to any "+" whose branch has been revealed, to fold it back down. The data stays loaded, so expanding it again is instant.

Half and step siblings

Full siblings are grouped together with one shared "+", since they always expand into the same parents. A half- or step-sibling branch gets its own group and label, each with its own line drawn up to its own father and mother, rather than one ambiguous line in the middle.

A group is labeled "half" only when it shares one parent by birth. A group that shares no parent by birth (e.g. a later spouse's own children from an earlier marriage) is labeled "step", even though that later marriage's family record otherwise looks just like a half-sibling one.

Spouses

Select a person and choose Expand spouses from their detail card to show their spouse(s) beside their own card, wherever it appears in the graph. Each spouse is shown as their own full sibling group, with their own "+" to keep expanding.

Once the spouse is expanded, their children's line connects to both parents, rather than just the person originally shown.

Children from several marriages

A person with children from more than one marriage gets a separate children box per marriage, each with its own connector line drawn up to that marriage's two parents.

Relationship badges

Any card whose tie to its parent isn't a plain birth relationship, sibling or child alike, carries a small badge naming it: Adopted, Stepchild, Foster, Sponsored or Unknown. These are the same Gramps relationship terms used everywhere else in the app.

Compact layout

A Compact checkbox, next to the chart's instructions:

• drops each card's photo,
• puts birth and death dates beside the name instead of below it,
• lists a sibling or children group as a vertical stack instead of side by side.

This helps once a sibling row gets wide.

Exporting a chart

The fan chart and the ancestor/descendant chart have an export icon that saves the chart as PNG, JPEG, SVG or PDF, like Gramps desktop's own chart export. The dialog remembers your last choices.

What gets exported

By default it exports the whole chart, however far you've zoomed or panned on screen. You can choose just the current view instead. Exports use light, print-friendly colors, even in dark mode.

Size and paper

• PNG and JPEG are saved at a pixel size you choose.
• SVG and PDF stay sharp at any size.
• PDF lets you pick the paper size (A0–A5, B3–B5, Letter, Legal, Tabloid, ANSI C/D), orientation and margin.

Rotated fans

A rotated fan can be exported as shown or upright. An upright export flips its labels to read the right way up in the upright view.

Names in other scripts

Names in Latin, Greek or Cyrillic script stay real, selectable text in the PDF. A chart with names in other scripts (Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, …) is saved as a high-resolution picture inside the PDF instead.