Scripting

I’ve been developing some new genealogy software, and one of the things I wanted it to do was export printable ancestor charts. In particular, I wanted a cascading pedigree, where earlier generations continue on additional pages, and a fan chart.

I built a Python library to generate both kinds of charts as PDFs. Then I decided to add support for reading GEDCOM files, which also allows it to function as a standalone CLI tool: you can pass a GEDCOM file to a command-line tool and get a printable chart back.

The result is Kincade.

Here are examples of the two chart types.

I’ve been using Advantage Archives for looking at the newspaper archives of a number of different libraries as a part of genealogy research.

The trouble is that each library has a slightly different UI for browsing these newspapers, and the experience can be fairly cumbersome. Ultimately, you can download a PDF if you want, but all the clicking around still makes the process slow and frustrating.

Of course the built-in MacOS Preview tool can show you PDFs, too, and it’s navigation/zoom interface is easier, too (especially using pinch-to-zoom, etc).