Cranefoot

Drawing a family tree seems easy at first, but if there are hundreds or more members or families, the task quickly becomes impractical to do by hand. CraneFoot is a lightweight program designed primarily for geneticists but you can use it for other pedigree visualization as well.

Cranefoot is able to process hundreds of families and thousands of individuals at once and wraps the results into a single document. It can cope with several marriages (two people who have at least one child) and cycles in the family graphs. Furthermore, if the pedigree file contains errors, such as false gender or duplicate entries, the user is notified of the problem. Unlike some other pedigree applications, Cranefoot employs a deterministic and thus very efficient drawing algorithm for each branch of the family tree. In fact, in many cases the layout step is almost linearly dependent on the number of nodes. For pedigrees under 1000 nodes the computational load is negligible with modern computers.

The principle behind the design of Cranefoot was simple: Quality before quantity. Scientists often make the mistake of adding features as soon as they get the program to run correctly for some input. This leads to incomprehensible and unmanageable sprawling code that is of little use to anyone. We have actively avoided such a tendency - and released the source code - with the hope that other people can also enjoy the results.

FinnDiane Study Group
Folkhälsan Research Center