You can try out my new app using the Geni API

Nice

Nice work!

Have you explored the 'limits'? e.g. how many layers / how many total profiles? (Practical limits vs. technological limits?)

Ha... I haven't really tested this because I don't know that anyone would care.

The tool goes up to 4th cousins, and if I see evidence that people are really interested and willing to print a gigantic poster up to 5th cousins, I guess I would add that option.

I presume you tried it with 4th cousins yourself? I'm always interested in what other people's posters look like since I can really only test with profiles I have access to.

The whole thing runs in JavaScript locally on your own web browser, so at some point it would probably exceed people's ability to run the code. If a service like Geni offered the tool themselves, it would likely be changed to run entirely or mostly on their own servers, not in a browser. As it is, when there are more than 250 people displayed, I turn off the interactive preview (with pan/zoom features), and if it's more than 600 people, I don't show a preview at all. Otherwise your browser tab would hang or crash.

I have written up some more details (not so technical though) on my blog https://faganm.com/blog/2025/03/05/1186/

I just tried it to 4th cousins for Charlemagne ... and it worked pretty well!

There are several places I noticed on the bottom portion of that diagram where the lines come really close ... and some where the text on "intentionally disconnected" lines kind of overlaps another line. Not bad; perhaps a bit more clarity (separation) might be possible?

That may be a good 'public' case you could use to refine the drawing rules a bit more.

I haven't tried the Charlemagne example, but I do agree that there are instances where lines overlap or are too close in different ways, and over time I plan for further improvements in this area. But after an insanely long development time, it was time for me to get something launched :-)

I'm skeptical it could ever be "perfect," whatever that mean (as an automated tool), which is why I'm happy that it provides an SVG file, so you can make manual edits if needed before printing, although this shouldn't generally be necessary.

There are also rare cases where there are actual bugs or scenarios I haven't written it to handle, but those will go down further over time as well.

At any rate, it's meant more for living people, as in, for yourself, or to gift to an immediate relative. Certain design choices would be different if meant to be used for understanding history.

Kaarle Suuri, frankkien kuningas ja roomalaisten keisari is your 36th great grandfather.

Very nice.

You should make the following MUCH more notable. I completely missed it the first time I ran a tree.

"There are too many people in the diagram to show a preview."

Karl Suur is your 31 th great grandfather

I also would like to add that this is an aesthetically pleasing design!

Shmuel-Aharon Kam (Kahn / שמואל-אהרן קם (קאן, thanks, I will make that text more prominent probably within the next 2 weeks.

Dan Cornett I'm glad you find it aesthetically pleasing. I certainly hope so (not that I won't continue to improve it), as the purpose is to be printed for display.

I was thinking about your Charlemagne example and I realized what's going on. So... the diagram, as I said, is focused on living people. People are *only* shown if they are living *or* within a "small" number of steps of the focus person. In this case, everyone in the diagram is deceased, so it's not actually showing any 4th cousins, it's just showing people up to one step beyond 1st cousin, as per the preset configuration for the "4th cousin" option. If there is a lot of demand for it, I could enable the diagram to work better for historical families, however that has not been the purpose thus far.

LeAnn: Don't worry about that ... just work your way "upward" (backwards in time) from yourself. You'll eventually connect -- or not.

FYI: This discussion is about a specific application using the Geni API ... it is not a discussion about 'Charlemagne'.

Shmuel-Aharon Kam (Kahn / שמואל-אהרן קם (קאן I've now made the "There are too many people in the diagram to show a preview" message more prominent, thanks for the suggestion.

It's one of some small fixes I did alongside the bigger piece of work to get this to use GEDCOM files in addition to the Geni API. As much as I appreciate Geni, some people aren't using it. One unfortunate thing is that GEDCOM doesn't seem to have any concept of birth order or marriage order, other than when birth dates and marriage dates are available.