From: Don A. <dal...@us...> - 2005-05-26 20:05:07
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Now that 2.0.x is released, it is time to start looking at reports. If you have a chance, please answer the following questions: 1) What reports does GRAMPS have that are useful? 2) What reports does GRAMPS have that are not useful? 3) What reports does GRAMPS need that it does not have? 4) How can the current reports be improved. Don -- Don Allingham GRAMPS - Open Source Genealogy http://www.gramps-project.org |
From: Michelle E. <mic...@gm...> - 2005-05-29 20:16:59
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Hi Don, this is the thread I was waiting for ;-) Here are my 2 cents: 1) What reports does GRAMPS have that are useful? Text reports: - Family Group Sheet - Complete Individual Summary - Detailed Ancestral Report - Detailed Descendant Report - Ahnentafel Report - Descendant Report Graphic reports: - Ancestor Chart - Wall Chart - Relationship Graph / Code Generators - Descendant Graph And, of course, the webpage. 2) What reports does GRAMPS have that are not useful? - Individual Summary - it's just a special case of Complete Individual Summary - FTM-Style reports - contains the same content like Detailed Text reports - Comprehensive Ancestors Report - contains the same contents like Detailed Ancestral Report. I don't like that the children are listed three times. In the text for the father, for the mother and in a list. But it has a nicer layout. 3) What reports does GRAMPS need that it does not have? - Hourglass Chart - An ancestor chart over a couple of pages, but not as huge as the wall chart. More compressed than the wall chart. 4) How can the current reports be improved. Detailed Text Reports: - I miss some kind of structure for the "embedded children list", perhaps new lines for birth and death, or commas. It's all in one line now: name birth death - without comma or something similar. Hard to read. - In general a more elaborate layout would be nice, like the Comprehensive Ancestors Report. Family Group Sheet: - Very important is the marriage date and place of the main couple - it's missing in the current version - I would like to have the options to include sources or notes. - A filter option like in the Complete Individual Report: print Family Group Sheets for active person only, descendants, ancestors, 5 generations forward/backward, entire database, etc - Optional inclusion of more events, like occupation or address. - A note that tells me, if there are other spouses. - Intelligent page break: if a couple has a lot of children, the table with the children breaks at an inappropriate point, for example after a childs name and before its birth date. That's not nice. Ancestor Chart: - Numbers for the people, so that I can find the connections between the different pages. Best would be Kekule-Numbers. A general option I'm missing is "private notes": if I had an ancestor, that died because of suicide or alcohol or he was criminal then I write it into my notes, but perhaps I don't want this to be printed in every report. I would like to have the possibility to take down private notes. Perhaps a new tab? Or a prefix that identifies the following text as private (like ~ in PAF). As a consequence I could imagine a checkbox for "Include private notes" as an option in reports. I hope it's not too much ;-) Michelle |
From: Richard T. <rjt...@th...> - 2005-05-31 12:16:36
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A few of issues that would improve the report experience: 1 - would it be possible to use the gnome-mime magic to open a viewer for a report as soon as the report is generated? 2 - is there some way of getting the font metrics information available to the reports? When I wrote my TraditionalDescendant report the biggest problem I had was getting a good looking layout went I new little of how big the text was going to be. This should be possible for PDF reports at least. 3. It would be "nice" to combine the options for those reports that essentially report the same thing but differ only in presentation. So a single options page for all 'Acendants Reports", one for "Decendants Reports" etc. With a selection for the format that the report should take e.g. Wall chart, Traditional Tree, Text Report etc. The options for which people to include and what information to include should be common between these categories of report. 4. An option to preview/print a report directly. I have no idea what capabilities gnome/gtk offers to achieve this. Richard On Thursday 26 May 2005 21:04, Don Allingham wrote: > Now that 2.0.x is released, it is time to start looking at reports. If > you have a chance, please answer the following questions: > > 1) What reports does GRAMPS have that are useful? > 2) What reports does GRAMPS have that are not useful? > 3) What reports does GRAMPS need that it does not have? > 4) How can the current reports be improved. -- Jabber: Ric...@ja... PGPKey: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xA7DA9FD9 Key fingerprint = D051 A121 E7C3 485F 3C0E 1593 ED9E D868 A7DA 9FD9 |
From: Don A. <don...@co...> - 2005-05-31 15:27:34
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Richard Taylor wrote: > A few of issues that would improve the report experience: > > 1 - would it be possible to use the gnome-mime magic to open a viewer for a > report as soon as the report is generated? This should be an option in the current version. We should be checking the mime-type to see if there is an associated viewer. If there is, there should be a checkbox beneath the format saying something like "Open with OpenOffice" (or whatever the mime-type is assocated with). > 2 - is there some way of getting the font metrics information available to the > reports? When I wrote my TraditionalDescendant report the biggest problem I > had was getting a good looking layout went I new little of how big the text > was going to be. This should be possible for PDF reports at least. This has been a problem. Fonts in general are not known up front - we've had to go with a generic "Roman" or "Swiss". Some formats support Arial, others Helvetica, some both. And once you branch beyond the basic latin fonts, it gets even more difficult. Postscript and PDF have the advantage in that you can programattically take the size of a string. Traditional formats don't allow you to do this. As a lame workaround, I calculated some font metrics from the standard postscript fonts to estimate the string size for roman and swiss font. This can be done using FontScale.string_width(). However, this is really only an approximation, since it was taken from a single font. If anyone has any better ideas, I would love to hear them. I don't think that linux/un*x/etc. has a standard way of accessing font information - at least not a way that is nicely accessible to python. > 3. It would be "nice" to combine the options for those reports that > essentially report the same thing but differ only in presentation. So a > single options page for all 'Acendants Reports", one for "Decendants Reports" > etc. With a selection for the format that the report should take e.g. Wall > chart, Traditional Tree, Text Report etc. The options for which people to > include and what information to include should be common between these > categories of report. Very good idea. > 4. An option to preview/print a report directly. I have no idea what > capabilities gnome/gtk offers to achieve this. We already support this. If you install the gnome-python2-gnomeprint or gnome-python-extras package, you can have direct printing with print preview. This is an optional module. Don |
From: Eero T. <eer...@ne...> - 2005-06-01 19:45:48
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Hi, On Tuesday 31 May 2005 18:27, Don Allingham wrote: > > 2 - is there some way of getting the font metrics information available > > to the reports? When I wrote my TraditionalDescendant report the > > biggest problem I had was getting a good looking layout went I new > > little of how big the text was going to be. This should be possible for > > PDF reports at least. > > This has been a problem. Fonts in general are not known up front - we've > had to go with a generic "Roman" or "Swiss". Some formats support Arial, > others Helvetica, some both. And once you branch beyond the basic latin > fonts, it gets even more difficult. > > Postscript and PDF have the advantage in that you can programattically > take the size of a string. Traditional formats don't allow you to do > this. > > As a lame workaround, I calculated some font metrics from the standard > postscript fonts to estimate the string size for roman and swiss font. > This can be done using FontScale.string_width(). However, this is really > only an approximation, since it was taken from a single font. > > If anyone has any better ideas, I would love to hear them. I don't think > that linux/un*x/etc. has a standard way of accessing font information - > at least not a way that is nicely accessible to python. Hm. I googled a bit. Pango seems to offer an API for accessing the font metrics: http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2reference/class-pangofontmetrics.html And as Pango works on top of Xft/fontconfig/freetype, and freetype should be able to access almost any standard font formats (including both TrueType and PostScript fonts), I would assume that you can load any about any font and ask about it's metrics, as long as the font is installed on the system. - Eero |
From: Adam S. <ad...@sc...> - 2005-05-31 18:32:14
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On Thu, 2005-05-26 at 16:04, Don Allingham wrote: > Now that 2.0.x is released, it is time to start looking at reports. If > you have a chance, please answer the following questions: > > 1) What reports does GRAMPS have that are useful? I currently use the Relationship Graph to get a graphical family tree. I use Detailed Descendant because it uses the images I have. > 2) What reports does GRAMPS have that are not useful? > 3) What reports does GRAMPS need that it does not have? > 4) How can the current reports be improved. Actually, the answers to each are the same, kinda. The Relationship Graph is good. What Gramps needs in the way of text reports is one that can print most (if not all) of the information that Gramps can hold. You can argue that it would be hard to print the stuff that a particular user adds (like a new event), but the text report should be able to write up the information stored in the basic fields that Gramps comes with. What I would like are things like: 1) Ability to print out information stored in all the Gramps basic fields. 2) Pictures (with the ability to select 'use all pictures' or 'use first picture' -- which implementation wise could just be an 'use only first picture' checkbox which, if not checked uses all pictures). 3) Being able to add the pictures with captions which would be the title associated with each image in the database. 4) Ability to save options. I always have to repick the same stuff. It would be nice if I could save and reload my settings or have Gramps just remember the last settings used. Even going back without quitting, all the options are reset back to defaults. For anybody that rememberd the proof-of-concept 'All-In-One' report plugin a while ago, I tried to solve the problems I saw. Since then, I started again on a report plugin that I called 'Extensive Report' (I didn't like All-In-One but I couldn't think of a better name at the time). Both had the same type of architecture (with Extensive being a better design of it). Features included: 1) Plugin support (yes, a plugin can have it's own plugins!) This allowed multiple people to help develop independently (as long as they weren't changing the core part). The report plugin would only offer options for those plugins that it could find (a plugin to write Birth/Death information, a plugin to write Marriage information, etc.). This would also allow the report plugin to write out more information as the subplugins got created. 2) Abililty to load and save options. No more having to remember what you set. There is probably more, but I haven't been able to work on it for a while and I don't remember all the particulars anymore. It was written and works with Gramps v1.0.11. 'Extensive' right now can write out Birth/Death & Marriage information crudely (so it's not as fully featured as I would like -- no infrastructure to do pictures yet). Now that 2.x is out, I don't know if the plugin part changed. I now run Red Hat 9 at work (still run Solaris at home), and I couldn't find any RPMs of the newer GNOME version needed for Gramps v2.x for RH9. I can't even figure out how to see what version is installed (I run the KDE desktop and I can see a version for that, but don't know what to do about GNOME). Given that, it might be a long time before I start up on 'Extensive' again. I'm guessing that better report plugins might come out in the meantime. If anybody is interested in seeing it, I can make it available online. -- Adam Stein @ Xerox Corporation Email: ad...@sc... Disclaimer: Any/All views expressed here have been proved to be my own. [http://www.csh.rit.edu/~adam/] |