Indentations in Descendant View Redux

RootsMagic
1

It doesn’t improve a thing to say it again, but I’m going to say something again anyway even though I have said it many times before. There have been several suggestions for improving the RM8/9/10 version of Descendant View, with some of the suggestions from me and some from others. I want to reiterate one of my suggestions. I think the indentations are wrong and they make it hard to distinguish spouses from children. The RM10 indents are very different than the RM7 indents and I think the RM7 style of indents need to be restored to RM10.

Here is the particular Descendant View that set me off.

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The person of interest was Elizabeth McCall person 49673 who is color coded yellow. Other color codings on this screen capture are red for relatives, green for spouses of relatives, and blue for second spouses of green people. Yellow is reserved for people with whom I have no connection. My color coding process is automated, so it’s not like I forgot to give Elizabeth McCall a color other than yellow. But I was trying to figure out why she was yellow when everybody else around her was red or green or blue.

This is important to me right now because I’m deleting most yellow people from my database. For the most part, I imported them via GEDCOMs from the Internet over 25 years ago, and they probably never should have been in my database in the first place.

So the question was, how was Elizabeth McCall related to the other people on the screen. I may be the only person in the world who finds it hard to see in this Descendant View, but I find it hard to see. So what I actually did was to fire up my RM7 briefly.to see the same view. Here it is.

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This time, I found it easy to see that Elizabeth McCall was the sister of James Albert McCall Jr. person 43220. That’s all I needed to know, and I was a happy camper except for having to open RM7 to see what was going on.

I’m sure many of you have no trouble seeing that James and Elizabeth were siblings by looking at RM10. I can’t. Or perhaps I was merely being dense on not being able to see the same thing on RM10 that day. And I’m sure there will be suggestions that I should have figured it out by looking at the top half of the side panel or by using the bottom half of the side panel set to the Family tab. I find the top half of the side panel to be very hard to use. I love the Family tab in the bottom half of the side panel. It is my default for the bottom half of the side panel and I use it all the time. But it doesn’t have the color blocks and I needed the context of the color blocks.

So here is my suggestion and proposal for improving the indentations of Descendant View. With this indentation, I find it easy to see that James Albert McCall Jr. and Elizabeth McCall were siblings with the proposed indentation. And what did I do? The way it is now, a person’s spouse are and children are indented a little bit, and they are indented pretty much the same. All I did was to indent the spouse a little and to indent the children a little more. The spouse and children should not be indented the same.

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I think a reasonable criticism or question of my proposal is what happens the people are not color coded. Well, they would look like the following with the new indentations. I think they look just fine when the people are not color coded.

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Finally, you may have noticed that I removed the little lines that are making a tree structure. I find that they do more harm than good, at least for my tired old eyes. But obviously I retained the little box with the + and - sign that can be used show or hide a branch of the tree. If the lines showing the tree structure could be retained while changing the indentations, I suppose that would be ok. But the indentations really, really need to be changed. And I would prefer not showing the lines with the tree structure. Rather, the tree structure is implicit in the indentations if the indentations are done correctly and the lines just clutter up the view without adding any additional information.

2

All the Spouses have plus signs and all the Children have generation numbers. The little lines that are making the tree structure denote and align with all the persons of each generation. Your suggestion forces smaller text to accomodate not only the required columns, but long Names and Birth/Death places and makes it slightly more difficult to visualize vertical alignments for generations. You have 7 generations selected in the view, imagine 7 generations of indent.

3

I totally agree. I don’t use the descendant view anymore simply because it’s hard to read the way it is.

4

Nice work illustrating everything
I am going say that I had limited experience with RM7 but used at same time when Preview8 came out. I always felt like the RM8 an beyond descendant view was step backwards. (Probably one of most biggest annoyances in views of Pre8/Post8 versions. The rm7 descendant view felt more natural. That said - finding an ideal mix of what would satisfy most everyone would not be an easy task. Adding collapse all or expand all would also be nice which I believe was mentioned in the past. @kbens0n also makes some points that columns with longer place names might make things difficult to read. I suppose being able to tweak / customize place (such as show/hide) might be one option.

Kevin

5

It’s probably there in the forum archives, but I just don’t remember a Collapse All or Expand All request. For all I know, I may have been the one who made the request. So I don’t remember the details of the request. I would certainly like to see a Collapse All and an Expand All that applies just to the rightmost generation. This would give one of my most long-term wishes for Descendant View.

Namely, if I am looking at 2 generations (or any number of generations), I would like as an option to add the spouses without also adding the children at the same time. You can get the same effect by switching to 3 generations and then manually collapsing all the children from the 3rd generation. But it’s a very manual process to collapse all the children of rightmost generation. Then, if you edit one of the people, all your collapsing is gone as soon as you exit from Edit Person.

I realize that not everybody is as bothered by the new Descendant View as I am. And I realize that all the information you need is actually there. But I find it just ever so hard to see, and the RM7 format was just ever so easy for me to see.

Another factor is that I use Descendant View far more in RM8/9/10 than I did in RM7. That’s because I regularly use it set to 2 generations rather than using Family View. The new Family View doesn’t show enough children on the screen at the same time and it doesn’t show full birth and death dates and places. So Descendant View set to 2 generations is my workaround. It probably wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t have to rely on it so much.

6

Your point about 7 generations of indent is well said. With 7 generations, the display tends to run off the right side of the screen in either the RM7 format or the RM8/9/10 format. For that reason, I use 2 generations or 3 generations most of the time, and I seldom go beyond 4 generations.

In this case, I didn’t know how many generations I needed to see to see the various color codes for this family. I just set it to 7 as a lazy way to get started, with the intent to reduce it back to 6 or 5 or 4 or whatever was required to see what I needed to see. It turned out that there were few enough generations that I didn’t need to set it back. Setting it back to 4 generations would have looked pretty much the same as it did at 7 generations. Just before I posted my message I realized I should have set it back to 4 anyway before doing the screen shot. But by that time, I had already done my editing of the screen shot to change the indents, and I didn’t want to do that editing over again. That kind of graphics editing is very tedious.

7

Jerry the Magician :wink:
Might apply for that – it was quite impressive actually – you deserve much credit

8

I think those who have since upgraded to RM8 or beyond simply have become accustomed to the new (not improved) look and those who never use RM7 would not be aware. I only used RM7 for about 2 months so…

9

I decided to post another example. Some of these family members are living, so I have redacted dates by focusing just on the list of names. The tree produced by the lines has 6 nodes, but there are only 3 children. That’s because the lines for the spouses look just like the lines for the children. It looks to me like there are 6 children. I realize that there are + signs for the spouses. But the tree lines and the color blocks dominate the + signs.

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Previously, I deleted the lines as a part of the way to improve the clarity But this time,I kept the lines and I still do the indents But the lines now represent a proper tree structure. So there are 3 lines when there are 3 children rather than 6 lines when there are 3 children. I certainly kept the box with the + and - signs to expand and collapse branches of the tree.

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