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The Charting Companion programs offer three flavors of color – regular, gradient and bevel. The gradient option creates a nice, smooth blend that softens the color, as in this example:   Gradient color The bevel option draws a beveled edge around each square, and adds a nice textured gradient in the center. Beveled color Both…

The traditional way of displaying a Descendant tree is “Top-down”, from top to bottom. This is also called the “English Monarchy” style. Here is an example, my maternal grand-father’s gang: Descendants – Top-down Left-to-right This format is well understood. However, it takes up more room. Our Charting Companion program offers another format, the Left-to-right. This…

The Charting Companion program has the unique ability to display a chart that includes the siblings of your Ancestors (uncles & aunts). The variable and unpredictable number of siblings makes this a challenge that no other graphics program has solved [1]. In the following chart of Mary Constance Colquhoun (my Scottish grandmother’s family), it is…

For the past few months I have been immersed in developing an Embroidery module for our Charting Companions. Our customers will be able to stitch a family tree on a T-shirt, which they can proudly wear at family reunions. The embroidered charts are fan-shaped. They come in quarter-circle, half- or full-circle. They are available as…

Progeny’s Charting Companion is now available for the popular on-line OneGreatFamily genealogy site. As OneGreatFamily’s Website says: OneGreatFamily is a cooperative effort between you and the rest of the world. It is an online genealogical service which allows everyone to combine their knowledge and data to build one huge, shared database. OneGreatFamily is more than…

Progeny’s Charting Companion is now available for the popular on-line Geni.com genealogy site. As Geni.com’s Website says: Geni is solving the problem of genealogy by inviting the world to build the definitive online family tree. Using the basic free service at Geni.com, users add and invite their relatives to join their family tree, which Geni…

The PDF technology used by Progeny can create a PDF file of unlimited size. (Well, almost unlimited: 231 pixels to be exact. At 600DPI, that’s about 3,579,139 inches). However, not all PDF readers are able to display large PDF files. We recently did some tests, and have some interesting findings. Here are the largest PDF…

Progeny’s Charting Companion includes a handy coloring feature that lets you assign a unique, custom color combination to any person in your family tree. Three colors each describe the text, background and border. Border, text and background colors Custom colors can be used to represent place of origin, medical condition, occupation, military history, etc. You…

Pedigree Collapse, also known as Implexus, occurs when distant cousins inter-marry, and parts of your family tree are duplicated. Since the number of your ancestors doubles every generation, and there are more humans alive than any period history, it is inevitable that we share the same ancestors, and we are all in a sense distant…

Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) is ubiquitous. There are many libraries available to create output in PDF format. But do they all produce equal results? A peek under the hood tells an interesting story. There are two types of image files: raster and vector. Raster files are like a TV picture: lines upon lines, divided…