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Madeline 2.0 Pedigree Drawing Engine
The Madeline 2.0 Pedigree Drawing Engine is a pedigree drawing program designed to handle large and complex pedigrees with an emphasis on readability and aesthetics. Although the program takes inspiration from Madeline v. 0.935, the Madeline 2.0 Pedigree Drawing Engine, or just Madeline 2.0 for short, is in fact a completely new and different program written from scratch by Ed Trager, Ritu Khanna, and Adrian Marrs.
For complex pedigrees we use a hybrid algorithm in which consanguinous loops are drawn as cyclic graphs whenever possible, but we resort to acyclic graphs when matings can no longer be connected without line crossings. A similar hybrid approach is used to avoid line crossings for matings between far-flung descendants of different founding groups. Written in object-oriented C++ and released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), Madeline 2.0 reads input files specified on the command line and generates pedigree drawings without user interaction. Pedigree output in scalable vector graphics (SVG) format can be viewed in browsers with native SVG rendering support such as Firefox 1.5+ and Opera 9.0+, or in vector graphics editors such as Inkscape.
A Brief History
Sometime around 1996 Ed Trager began to writing a program for preparing, visualizing, and exploring human pedigree data used in genetic linkage studies. This became the program known as Madeline which remains in use by researchers worldwide. In addition to converting pedigree and marker data into various formats required by linkage analysis software, including Crimap, Genehunter, Allegro, Mendel, Merlin, PedCheck, and Simwalk2, Madeline also provides functionality for querying pedigree data sets and for drawing pedigrees. The current development version is 0.936 and the stable version is 0.935.
Madeline 0.935 remains a capable program, but it's pedigree drawing routines have many limitations because the program was originally only designed to handle single descent trees of simple nuclear families. Consanguinous loops, multiple mated individuals, and multiple founding groups often occur in the extended family pedigrees used in modern genetic studies, and much work has been invested in finding better ways to visualize these kinds of pedigrees.
In the Madeline 2.0 pedigree drawing engine, we have tried to create a much more robust pedigree drawing engine to address the limitations of the older program and to provide the worldwide research community with a better tool for pedgiree visualization.
Find Out More
Click on the following resources to find out more about Madeline 2.0:
Using Madeline 2.0 on the Web
If you are using a web browser with the ability to render SVG graphics natively (currently this means Firefox 1.5+ or Opera 9.0+), then you can use our interactive public web service:
Please note that this is currently an experimental service. By using this service, you agree to use at your own risk as there is no warranty of performance or protection against data loss.
Getting Madeline 2.0
Checking out code from the Subversion Repository
(2007.02.28)
You may now obtain Madeline 2.0 from our Sourceforge project Subversion repository using a command such as the following:
svn co https://madeline2.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/madeline2 madeline2
Downloading Stable Releases
No releases are available at this time (2007.02.13.ET), but please feel free to check the code out of our Sourceforge project Subversion repository.
Contact
For more information, contact the developers: