ged2dot, a GEDCOM to Graphviz converter
The latest version is v7.0, released on 2020-08-18. See the release notes.
What’s the problem the tool solves?
ged2dot is a script that takes a GEDCOM
file and tries to visualize it using Graphviz's dot
tool. The basic idea is that you can map individuals to graph nodes and
families to graph edges, then dot takes care of the rest. What’s unique about
ged2dot is that it allows more than showing ancestors and descendants of a
single individual (what you can easily do with random family editor software).
You need to have a working ged2dotrc for the tool to process your .ged file. See the example in test/screenshotrc for a very complete list of options
Layouts
LibreOffice Draw GEDCOM import filter
The libreoffice/ subdirectory contains a LibreOffice extension, that
implements a GEDCOM import filter for Draw. Needless to say, it uses ged2dot
internally — think of it as a GUI for ged2dot, with the additional benefit
that you can hand-edit the resulting layout in Draw, if you want.
Its dependencies:
-
It uses Graphviz to process the
dotformat. In case you don’t have Graphviz installed:-
For Windows, get it here (2.38 is tested).
-
For Linux, use your package manager to install the
graphvizpackage (2.28 is tested). -
For macOS, get it here (2.36 is tested).
-
-
LibreOffice >= 6.1
Features:
-
Filter detection: you can use File → Open and select a GEDCOM file, and it’ll be opened in Draw automatically.
-
Import options: On import, a graphical dialog can be used to set a subset of the options available in a
ged2dotrc. -
Internally reuses the excellent SVG import filter of LibreOffice, contributed by Fridrich Strba and Thorsten Behrens, so the result can be manually fine-tuned if necessary.
-
Runs on Windows and Linux and macOS.
You can grap a release binary at the LibreOffice Extensions site — more on how to to install a LibreOffice extension here.
Once that’s done, you’ll see something like this if you open a GEDCOM file:
Bugs
For ged2dot, in case a given input results in a runtime crash, it’s
considered a bug. If you have a fix for it,
pull requests on GitHub are
welcome, especially if the fix comes with a test as well.
For the LibreOffice extension, in case you get an error during opening:
-
For Windows, the log file location is something like:
C:/Users/John/Application Data/LibreOffice/4/user/Scripts/python/log.txt
-
For Linux, start LibreOffice from a terminal, the log is printed to the standard error.
-
For Mac, start LibreOffice from Terminal:
cd /Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/program ./soffice --nologo /path/to/test.ged
then the log is printed to the standard error as well.
Icons
Icons are from WPZOOM, in case placeholders have to be used for missing images.
Download
From GitHub.

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