Tips on lines in charts and posters

Family History Charting

Tips on Lines

Lines have 3 characteristics (thickness, colour and style).The appropriate selection of these depends on the size that you expect to print the output and the relative degree of emphasis you want from each line.

HINTS

line thickness
The most important attribute is line thickness. In those packages where the user has control over the line thickness, it is advisable to increase the line thickness on wall-charts that are to be viewed from a distance (e.g. the lines that join persons between generations should be thicker).
line colour
The colour of a line should be in the darker regions of the colour wheel. In any case the colour should be a contrast to the background over which it is printed. As colours get darker it becomes more difficult for the eye to discern the difference between colours dark blue and black, dark red and brown, etc.
line style
In many packages, the choice of a non-solid line style (e.g. dashed) implies that you can only use a standard narrow line thickness. If this is the case with your package, then you should choose very carefully when you use a non-solid line. If you can't use a wide line thickness with a non-solid line then make sure that the line has a lot of non printed area around it if it is to be clearly visible on a wall-chart. When you can use a thicker line with non-solid lines, then don't use too many variants as the eye can can easily get confused. It is better to use colour to differentiate line usages than to use additional the line styles.

TIPS on Filled Areas of Colour

Colours seen on the screen while viewing a chart or poster will:

not exactly match those printed colours (colour balance).
appear much darker and more dominant when printed (intensity).
mask the overprinted text if there is the wrong choice of colours (contrast).

HINTS

The lighter colours of the 16-colour set (cyan, yellow, magenta, mid-grey) are still too intense for most backgrounds - you need to choose colours that are much lighter!
Choose colours for backgrounds and fills that have a very large proportion of whiteness (saturation) over 200 if you are to over print it with darker text. (The answer of adding up the Red, Green and Blue values and dividing by 3 should be 200 or greater.)
Text colours should ideally be opposite to the background colour on the colour wheel. (An approximate method to achieve this is to subtract the value for the each of Red, Green and Blue of the background colour values from 255 as the corresponding values of RGB for the text colour.)
Only use a textured background of an extremely light form - if it is too dark it can detract from the visual appeal of the final printed product.

Text and Fonts

There are a number of issues about the text in documents that the user should be aware of. Some of these are technical like the substitution of fonts that are not in the standard set, while others are a matter of style and taste.

Style Issues

Type size
Two typefaces of the same size can have quite different readability. The user should not make all fonts the same size without looking at the consequences. It is important on documents that are large in expanse to make the type sufficiently large that it can be read at a distance.
Choice of typeface
Some typefaces are open, uncomplicated and easy to read, others are the opposite cluttered, distorted. Use calligraphic and handwriting typefaces sparingly and where they are in open areas of the document.
Condensed typefaces
Some typefaces are available in condensed and extra condensed forms, for instance, compare Arial with Arial Narrow. These condensed typeface forms are very useful when cramming extra text into limited areas of the document (e.g. genealogical box charts).
Number of typefaces
It is considered bad practice to use more than about 4 typefaces in any one document. The use of a typeface should be consistent.
Use of emphasis
Use of bold or italic is preferable to underlining. Underlining in some typefaces makes them almost impossible to read.
Use of colour
Be aware that some coloured text can be hard to read (especially light colours or on some background colours). Some darker colours can add emphasis to the text. For instance, putting the names of persons is slightly large type face in a dark red on a genealogical chart easily separates the names from the other details.
Magnification
Depending on the craft of the typographer some fonts can stand magnification and retain their smooth form while other will staircase, sawtooth and become polygonal - all of which is not nice! Choose carefully if you want to blow up your output.

Technical Issues about fonts

Font availability
When you save a file to be printed by SCEYA you must be aware that although you can choose to use any font that is installed on your machine, that does not mean that SCEYA can print it in the same way as it looked to you on the screen. This is only possible if SCEYA also has all the fonts that you have used also installed on its computers.

Tips on Images

Images can suffer several effects when printed on a chart or poster:

images become pixellated or saw-toothed
(you can see small squares of colour)
images becomes grainy
(as if pictures are out of focus)
images become darker than expected
(loss of contrast and detail in generally dark areas)
image colours not reproduced as expected
(colour balance, bright colours often more intense)
sharp edges in images become furry
(loss of edge definition)
images become broken
(segmented - some lines become dashed)
images have unexpected frame lines
(only seen at high screen magnification and when printed)
some thin vertical or horizontal lines in images get omitted
(often vertical and horizontal lines disappear in reduced images)

HINTS

Be careful how you store your images - don't store them in a lossy format like JPG until you have finished manipulating them. Use TIFF or PSP. Every time that you change resolution or the method of storage of an image it is likely to reduce its quality. You need a computer with about 3 times the RAM of the expanded image size to effectively edit it.
Don't move from one storage format to another while manipulating an image. Each change will potentially make the image more grainy.
Don't reduce the resolution of an image until you have finished manipulating it. If you do reduce the number of pixels per inch too early you are likely to get a pixellated image or regions with saw-tooth boundaries.
Don't reduce the resolution of an image that you want to magnify in printing. All the imperfections in the method of storage get magnified on the printed output.
Don't store images with sharp edges (like box charts) in photographic compression formats like JPG. Use of JPG here leads to furry lines and regional boundaries with odd pixels of colour sprayed about.
Use clean methods of embedding images in a document. Different packages don't store the image in the best way for printing. For instance, in Word97, use a text box to hold the image, don't insert the image on the page directly.
Make sure that the border width of any embedded image is zero unless you want the border.
Use PNG format instead of GIF whenever possible for storing line diagrams.
Increase the contrast in an image to overcome the loss of contrast in printing.