familytreemaker

This program creates family tree graphs from simple text files.

The input file format is very simple, you describe persons of your family line by line, children just have to follow parents in the file. Persons can be repeated as long as they keep the same name or id. An example is given in the file LouisXIVfamily.txt (you can create your own seperate file in this case like what I did but I have not committed this info).

Note: This branch version is optimized for chinese (and has been further modified). If other language for input text file is used, command option gender (-g) has to be used to specify words of male and female, since their default values are set as "男" and "女" instead of origin "M" and "F".

Credits to: Adrien Vergé and Bodhi Wang

Installation

Simply clone the repo or install package familytree by pip as shown below:

pip install familytree

This script outputs a graph descriptor in DOT format. To make the image containing the graph, you will need a graph drawer such as [GraphViz] 1.

Usage

usage: familytreemaker.py [-h] [-a ANCESTOR] [-g GENDER] [-v INFOLEVEL]
                          [-o OUTFILE]
                          INPUTFILE

Generates a family tree graph from a simple text file

positional arguments:
  INPUTFILE     the formatted text file representing the family

optional arguments:
  -h, --help    show this help message and exit
  -a ANCESTOR   make the family tree from an ancestor (if omitted, the program
                will try to find an ancestor)
  -g GENDER     customized gender string, for example: "男,女" or "M,F"
  -v INFOLEVEL  Information level (0/1/2) to output. (0 - only name and
                surfname will be output; 1 - time of birthday and deathday
                will be invisable; 2 - all information will be output)
  -o OUTFILE    file name for output

The sample family descriptor LouisXIVfamily.txt is here to show you the usage. Simply run:

python familytreemaker.py -a "王灿文" -v2 -o LouisXIVfamily.dot LouisXIVfamily.txt && \
    dot -Tsvg -o LouisXIVfamily.svg LouisXIVfamily.dot

If package familytree has been installed by pip, commands below can be performed to populate:

python -m familytree.familytreemaker -a "王灿文" -v2 -o LouisXIVfamily.dot LouisXIVfamily.txt && \
    dot -Tsvg -o LouisXIVfamily.svg LouisXIVfamily.dot

* if code fails to run, try omitting the quotes in the name (i.e. "王灿文" -> 王灿文

It will generate the tree from the infos in LouisXIVfamily.txt, starting from 王灿文 and saving the image in LouisXIVfamily.svg.

Prerequisites

Python 3.x < 3.10
GraphViz (installing through pip, compiling from source or the provided .msi is fine.)
Notepad++ (recommended, but not necessary, for utf-8 and ANSI support).
Windows Chinese Language Pack
Registry change for Windows 10 (if you use US/UK English as a default language).
- Add string Autorun with value chpc 936 for Simplified Chinese (SG/Chinese) on command prompt startup
- Reopen cmd

Notes

May have to change encoding scheme (possible if using Notepad++) as per this article: https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/17226/wrong-encoding
If one inserts 4 or more generations, tree might get unbalanced and so lines might not look aesthetic.

Modifications to original

Remove surname suffix at end of the name (i.e. 《陈》)
Change main styling of line to ortho (takes the "family tree" shape more) to allow for more generations

RyanNgCT / familytreemaker