Robins's Visual Chart Form Tips

Annotating Charts

This page created 1 Sep 2014

Hosted by Terry's TMG Tips

This article explores ways of annotating a chart:

1. Adding photographs of buildings, ships, gathering, etc
2. Adding heraldry family crests, tartans, flags
3. Maps of travels or distribution of ancestors
4. Notes about special persons
5. Notes to show where descendants of marrying cousins are shown.
6. Notes about special relationships, like named after
7. Color-coding by generation, or place of birth, or emigration, occupation, military service, etc.
8. Arrows to link these together
9. A simple border for the chart

Adding images is discussed in sections about Adding Images.

However, the adding of text boxes for notes, arrows and borders have not. VCF has tools that make most this very easy. The use of color for accenting is in the Accents and Color Coding article

Text Boxes

1. Click on the  text box button then click on the canvas where you want it.
2. Select it, right click > Properties to set whether want any outline, any fill, the font settings and if you want to the text.
3. Once you have set these double-click on the word “Text” and type in the message.

 COMMENT: Personally having set one box up with the font size, etc I tend to copy and paste it instead of creating a new each time.

4. You can select and drag the box to the location or for small movements use the arrow keys.
5. If you want to use say italic (for a ship name) in the message, create several text boxes and park them together to read the way you want. To get to read without gaps consider creating an ordered pile with “set to back” operations and with no outline and transparent fill.
6. The  rotate button allows text at any rotation.
7. The  buttons provide other simpler operations.

Lines and Arrows

1. The poly line and poly curve (see Limitations of Lines) provide a way of drawing segmented and controlled curved lines.
2. By creating a filled closed poly line, it is possible to create a rotatable arrowhead
3. If you want a line to have a single arrowhead anchored to a connection point, or the edge of a box, then the multi-segment line created by the  button must have the arrowhead end at an anchor point.
4. If you want a line to have a double arrow head anchored to a connection point, or the edge of a box, then the multi-segment line created by the  button must have one end at an anchor point.

Chart Borders

1. The easiest way to create a border for a chart is to draw a large transparent fill rectangle sent to back.
2. However, this can be significantly improved by a small amount of work using 3 rectangles.

3. Alternatively, a pattern can be created for the corners and pasted appropriately rotated at each corner.

Copyright 2014- by Robin Lamacraft