Developing a program to make a family tree.

[Tim Harig]

On 2011-01-14, Ata Jafari <a.j.romanista at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to develop a program like family tree maker. I have all
> information, so there is no need to search on the net. This must be
> something like trees. Can someone help me? I'm at the beginning.

I don't know anything specific about family tree software and you don't
really specify what you want your software to do.  I can only assume
that you are interested in taking the data in some format which contains
the links between family members and creating a tree representation of
that data?

If I was going to attempt something like this, I would probably generate
the representation as a set of postscript instructions.  I would start
with a basic template for a union which could be essentially pasted
into different places in the output page.  Then generating your tree
is a simple matter of laying out the templates to match your data,
filling in the template fields for each persion within their union,
and drawing the connecting lines of the tree.

Since I was already generating postscript anyway, I would probably
implement much of the actual logic in postscript (the built in stacks
provide an exellent way to process tree like structures in all of their
nested levels). I would Python provide any user interface for manipulating
the data and to dump the data into the postscript program.