[Gramps-users] Comprehensive Ancestor report suggestions

[Tim A. <ti...@pr...>]

I've just started experimenting with the comprehensive ancestor report 
in gramps 2.0.5 and have a bit of feedback.

First some good points. I like the list of sources at the end, and the 
fact that the notes for the sources are quoted - in my database I have 
most of the actual information from the source in the notes, so it makes 
the report quite complete. I also like the amount of information 
reported about each person - other reports tend to have too little, this 
one seems about right.

Now some suggestions for improvement. Showing photos when they are 
present is good, but if there is no photo then there doesn't seem to me 
to be much point drawing attention to it with a huge box labelled "no 
photo". If there is no photo, then surely the absence of any actual 
photo is sufficient to make that evident? If you go back more than a few 
generations, then unless you're extremely fortunate you're not going to 
have too many photos, so having more than half your report cluttered up 
with "no photo" boxes doesn't look good. If there's no photo, just leave 
it out.

There is a formatting glitch where if you have death details but no 
birth details for someone, it runs the words together between the name 
and the death details. I should check this again at home, as to exactly 
what happens, I'm describing from memory.

It seems that the thumbnails that get shown are the person's own photo 
on the left, and the person's spouse, if any, on the right. Since the 
person's spouse will almost certainly also feature in the report, with 
their own photo, I suggest it'd be better to instead put a second photo 
of the same person on the right, if there is one. The spouse's photo 
could be a fallback if there is only one photo.

The gap between the list of children of one person and the next person 
is sometimes a bit indistinct, and easy to miss. Maybe there needs to be 
a more pronounced change in formatting, or even something as unsubtle as 
a horizontal line. Perhaps underlining the name of the person (but not 
their children)?

The use of "is" vs "was" seems a bit inconsistent. I presume the 
intention is that "is" is for people who either are alive or could be, 
and "was" is for the departed. In many cases I have ancestors who would 
be well past 150 if they were still alive, but are reported using "is" - 
should some heuristic be applied? I recall reading that the oldest 
recorded living human reached about 124, so how about assuming anyone 
over 124 is no longer with us? In my database I have many more people 
with documented births than I do with documented deaths. A simpler 
option, which would be acceptable in my opinion, would be to just use 
"is" for everyone, punt on the whole issue, and say that our ancestors 
are in some sense still with us - else why would we be bothering to 
document them? :) This thing must be lots of fun to translate, by the way!

I gather the general plan for reforming reports is to try to unify them, 
and introduce lots of knobs to twiddle that will let you emulate the old 
ones, as well as do different things. Sounds like a good plan to me, but 
I don't envy whoever actually implements it - getting the factoring 
right is going to be hard :-).

BTW, unrelated to the reports as such, I just remembered a cool feature 
that GeneWeb has - it has a page that tells you about upcoming birthdays 
and anniversaries. That wouldn't be too hard to do, would it? Might save 
a few people from the embarrassment of forgetting important dates due to 
spending too much time buried in their genealogies :).

Thanks for a truly useful piece of software, hope my feedback is of some 
use,

Tim

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Tim Allen          ti...@pr...
Proximity Pty Ltd  http://www.proximity.com.au/