Sizing Matters

Controlling the size of your chart

When the size of a chart gets unwieldy, there are three items to consider: paper size, font size and the number of people on the chart.  One of the three needs to give in order to accommodate the other two items. If a large font is desirable, a chart would either need to be on a large piece of paper, or have a smaller amount of people in order to enlarge the font size. 

A circle chart is good to get multiple generations into a small amount of space and leave blanks to show where more information is needed.  However, circle charts are not ideal to add extra information such as extensive geographical information, stories or pictures.  Regular box charts are ideal to be able to add extra information and leave space for additional images.

Left to Right (or right to left) and Top to Bottom (or bottom to top) charts can be very different in size depending on the information a chart displays.  With large amounts of people/generations, a left to right format can save about 1/3 the space because of the way the boxes layout.  The chart size is determined by the size of largest generation.  On a left to right chart each individual box can be laid out to take less space in the overall generation.  For a top to bottom chart, each individual box has to be a certain width to accommodate long names and the way our language moves from right to left.  So top to bottom charts have to be larger to have room for each individual’s information.