ged2dot, a GEDCOM to Graphviz converter

What’s the problem the tool solves?

ged2dot is a script that takes a GEDCOM file and tries to visualize it using Graphviz's dot tool. The basic idea is that you can map individuals to graph nodes and families to graph edges, then dot takes care of the rest. What’s unique about ged2dot is that it allows more than showing ancestors and descendants of a single individual (what you can easily do with random family editor software).

Layouts

• The default layout allows to show ancestors of a family (both husband and wife), and you can set how many generations do you want to see:

• There is also a Descendants layout, that shows all descendants of a root family.

LibreOffice Draw GEDCOM import filter

The libreoffice/ subdirectory contains a LibreOffice extension, that implements a GEDCOM import filter for Draw. Needless to say, it uses ged2dot internally — think of it as a GUI for ged2dot, with the additional benefit that you can hand-edit the resulting layout in Draw, if you want.

Its dependencies:

• It uses Graphviz to process the dot format. In case you don’t have Graphviz installed:

  • For Windows, get it here (2.34 is tested).

  • For Linux, use your package manager to install the graphviz package (2.28 is tested).

  • For Mac, get it here (2.36 is tested).

• We depend on LibreOffice >= 4.2 RC1 because fdo#39206 is not fixed in earlier versions.

Features:

• Filter detection: you can use File → Open and select a GEDCOM file, and it’ll be opened in Draw automatically.

• Import options: On import, a graphical dialog can be used to set a subset of the options available in a ged2dotrc.

• Internally reuses the excellent SVG import filter of LibreOffice, contributed by Fridrich Strba and Thorsten Behrens, so the result can be manually fine-tuned if necessary.

• Runs on Windows and Linux.

You can grap a release binary at the LibreOffice Extensions site — more on how to to install a LibreOffice extension here.

Once that’s done, you’ll see something like this if you open a GEDCOM file:

Bugs

For ged2dot, in case a given input results in a runtime crash, it’s considered a bug. If you have a fix for it, pull requests on GitHub are welcome, especially if the fix comes with a test as well.

For the LibreOffice extension, in case you get an error during opening:

• For Windows, the log file location is something like:

C:/Users/John/Application Data/LibreOffice/4/user/Scripts/python/log.txt

• For Linux, start LibreOffice from a terminal, the log is printed to the standard error.

• For Mac, start LibreOffice from Terminal:

cd /Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/program
./soffice --nologo /path/to/test.ged

then the log is printed to the standard error as well.

Icons

Icons are from WPZOOM, in case placeholders have to be used for missing images.