This is a template for rendering simple family trees consisting of boxes and connecting lines based on an ASCII art-like syntax. The trees are displayed as HTML tables using CSS attributes, and may contain arbitrary wiki markup within the boxes.
This template produces one row in a family tree table. The template accepts up to 80 unnamed parameters describing the contents of the table. Each parameter specifies a tile or a box.
Tiles are line drawing symbols consisting of horizontal and vertical lines and various corners and crossings thereof. Tiles are specified using single-character symbols that more or less approximate the shape of the tile in appearance. A special case of a tile is the empty tile, specified by a single space character. A table of supported tiles is given below.
Solid lines:
,
.
`
'
^
v
(
)
-
!
+
Dashed lines:
F
7
L
J
A
V
C
D
~
:
%
Mixed:
*
}
{
t
#
y
h
]
[
X
T
K
k
G
Boxes can contain arbitrary wiki markup. The contents of boxes are specified using additional named parameters appended to the template call. Each box is three tiles wide and normally has a 2 pixels wide black border. Boxes can have any name that is a valid template parameter name, although single character names should be avoided to prevent conflicts with tile symbols.
The appearance of the boxes may be controlled by the optional template parameters border and boxstyle. The former sets the width of the box border in pixels, while the latter can be used to append arbitrary CSS declarations directly to the box style attributes. For example, the following code:
NOTE: When specifying style attributes for individual named boxes, make sure the box names are aligned to the left side of area reserved for them in the template call (as in "|RED |" instead of "| RED |" in the example above). Otherwise the template will end up looking for a style parameter with spaces in its name.
The {{familytree/start}} template also accepts an optional style parameter that can be used to set CSS styles for the entire table.
This template has accessibility problems for screen reader users. The relationships between boxes (the lines) will be hidden, effectively reducing the chart to a series of paragraphs in order by row. Charts with each generation on separate rows (rather than in columns) should be a bit more accessible. It is also recommended that you add a summary parameter to the start tag to describe the overall layout of the table. For example:
{{familytree/start| summary=Family tree diagram for Barack Obama, connecting 29 individuals in 4 generations. Generations are arranged in rows, with Barack appearing 3rd on the 3rd such row. The bottom right corner breaks out some additional relationships of his father.}}
