Producing compact legible charts

TreeDraw Standard Edition and TreeDraw Legacy Edition; our genealogy charting software.

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Rosemarie Barnes
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Feb 09, 2006 4:31 pm

Producing compact legible charts

Post by Rosemarie Barnes » Thu Feb 09, 2006 7:16 pm

I have just purchased Treedraw Ver 3.03.
I can produce nice decendant trees with the names in boxes.
The problem is that these cover 4 or even 6 A4 sheets when printed
I want to produce a more compact tree.
If I use "fit to page" then the text is too small to read.

I think I could produce what I want if I could achieve one or both of the following.

I can reduce the width of the chart if I move the boxes closer together, however this is very slow to do individually by the time I have adjusted all the lines. Can I alter a default setting to generate the chart with the boxes closer together?

I could also achieve a smaller chart if I could reduce the size of the boxes at the same time keeping the text size the same. I have tried using the handles to reduce the box size but all I can do is move the whole box with its contents. Can I grab the box handles and resize the box without impacting the contents?

Thanks to anyone who can help

Nick Hunter
Posts: 669
Joined: Sun Dec 18, 2005 9:36 am
Location: SpanSoft, Scotland
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Post by Nick Hunter » Fri Feb 10, 2006 11:43 am

Changing the horizontal grid spacing in "Options | Preferences | Appearance | Snap to grid" will move the boxes closer together.

The reason you can't resize the boxes is because they are grouped with the text inside them. Select the box and use "Edt | Ungroup". Then you will be able to reselect the box only and resize it.

It is possible to import the tree without grouping by taking "Group tree elements" out of the import options.

Clive Hawkins
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2006 8:34 pm
Location: Herefordshire, UK

Producing compact legible charts

Post by Clive Hawkins » Fri Feb 10, 2006 9:07 pm

I had exactly the same problem and managed to achieve a good result after considerable trial and error. I juggled font size, word wrap and H & V grid to get a good readable chart of the correct size and then entered peculiar margin sizes to centralise it on the paper.

I guess the exact figures will vary with the size of your chart, but I used 6, 60, 4, 8 for font, etc and T=0.12, L=0.5, R=0.49, B=0.12 for margins.

Another disadvantage of the "size to fit" facility is that the relationship between the cart elements and the grid is lost. This doesn't matter until you try to move anything when it immediately "snaps to grid". This can play havoc with (in particular) the chart lines.

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