Tutorial on charting

Family History Charting

USER EDITING OF CHARTS - BENEFITS AND PENALTIES

There are advantages and disadvantages in editing a chart after it has been generated.

Benefits of Editing a Chart after Generation
Editing enables you make changes to:

improve the use of space,
add annotations such as images and maps,
eliminate information not intended to be displayed
(like data on living persons or sensitive family matters).

Disadvantages of Editing a Chart after Generation
Every editing action you make must be redone when you generate the same chart again after updating your database. Some of the customizations can take many hours only to get lost when you discover an error in your data set or when you acquire for more information.

Evaluation of Software Controls
If you use software that allows you to edit the chart after generation, then it is important that you use as many automatic facilities to reduce those systematic edits and leave only the edits that have no easily described consistent action. There are suggestions that it would be nice to have charting software that can dynamically update the chart as the data in the data set is edited. Unfortunately, there are limits to this functionality. No charting software provides these features at the moment and lets the user lock those edits that they do not want to be disturbed by a redrawing of a chart to accommodate the addition or deltion of groups of persons.

Editing Controls and Software Internal Structure
Some charting software has powerful editing facilities like selecting boxes on the basis of genealogical relationships. The quality of the finished product can be spoiled by the wrong method of storage and insertion of annotations. Some software does not allow the use of appropriate image compression technologies, for instance a JPG compression is not appropriate for the storage and embedding of a line diagram like a map whereas it is very suitable to embed a photograph.