Legacy Charting - New Backgrounds Now Available

Legacy Charting, software that creates large-scale wall charts of your family tree, now has new background images available for free download.

Legacy Charting will be included with the soon-to-be-released Legacy Family Tree 7.0. This special pre-release edition of Legacy Charting is available for free download and will be fully functional through June 15, 2008. Download it here.

When you install Legacy Charting, it includes a collection of 40 background images and textures. We have now created a special Backgrounds page on the Legacy Charting website where you can download additional high-quality background images, or even contribute your own digital pictures to share with other "wall-charters".

Visit http://www.legacycharting.com/backgrounds.htm to download the new images or share yours with us.

How to add a background image to a chart

In Legacy Charting, follow these steps to add a background image:

1. Click on the Appearance tab, then click on the Background button.
2. Click on Select image, select your desired image, and click Open.
3. In the Display Options, select your preferred option. Stretch to frame works well with larger images.
4. Finally, adjust the transparency. Then click anywhere on the chart.

Descendant Chart (2 generations) without a background:

 

Descendant Chart (2 generations) with a background:

Comments

[JL Beeken]

Can we take our own pictures for the background and send them in for printing without making them public? I see the ones you have for sharing are 72 dpi. Is that sufficient or are you holding another copy at higher resolution for the actual printing?

[Geoff Rasmussen]

JL, yes, if you use your own digital picture as a background, it won't be shared with anyone. Regarding resolution, the pictures I've taken with my digital camera end up being 72dpi. I've had charts printed using them as backgrounds and they look really good.

[Janice]

It's great and looks nice. I have only tried it so far with my Mother's side,now for the rest of my family and my husbands.

[JL Beeken]

I'm working on a chart for some-one else that looks like it would end up about 50" wide. I use a program called Autostitch for making panoramas and have calculated at 300 dpi (usual printing practice) it would take about a dozen pictures across and 3 rows deep, taking into consideration overlap and the natural curvature of panos. The picture would be about 18,000 pixels wide! Does that even sound right? Pictures come off their digital camera at 180 dpi. I'm trying to get a definitive take on this, as they're moving across the country, and plan to make one last trip to a special location where, I've heard, they intend to set up a tripod on the beach.

[Mark Trevithick]

Autostitch is a fantastic program. I've looked at costly alternatives and none compare in quality and ease. To your question, 50" wide by 300 dpi, assuming that each dot represent a pixel, is 15,000 pixels wide. That sounds correct. Based on the 3 rows high, you would have approximately 3,750 pixels high.

How do you intend to produce the printed panorama of that size?

[JL Beeken]

I'm hoping that's Legacy's job.

15,000 pixels sounds like alot but it's still only about 4 feet across, and about a foot deep if I remember right.

[Wendell Pope]

Legacy Charting has boxes 3 columns wide. This makes the picture quite small and the chart very wide. There needs to be an option to make boxes one column wide with the picture at the top and information at the bottom so that charts would not be so wide.

[Geoff Rasmussen]

Wendell, this can already be done. In the Box Items section, just keep everything in the same column. Then sort the picture to the top. Or, select the Mug Shot theme, and it will do as you request.

[Irma Shepherd]

I love the new chart photo of the covered wagon. Thank you to the submitter.

[NReykdal]

I've played with my new charting capability. Unfortunately, my ancestors tended to have "litters" rather than a few children, & just doing a "simple" 3 generation descendant chart ends up being over 25 feet in width (which seems rather excessive). One of the reasons for the excessive width is that the last generation's spouses are placed on the same line as the descendant. (When I manually dragged the spouses & placed them below each descendant, slightly indenting them so that multiple spouses were clearly denoted, it reduced the overall size of the chart tremendously!) Could you possibly consider this feature on a future version of Legacy Charting Deluxe? I figure since the last line in the descendants chart isn't going to show the children descending from them anyway, there's no reason to make the chart wider by placing the spouse(s) on the same line... Thanks for you consideration of this.