Make a timeline?

Question

Is there any good way to make a timeline (such as covering who lived at what time) in yEd?  That would be a nice thing to do, and it seems like a graphing-type function, but I don't see anything in here that looks like one.

Comments

What is the status regarding the timeline feature? Ist it happening?!

---

Timeline layout is currently on hold.

---

Funny how this one came full circle - I went ahead with collaborative network planning: From yEd to starting the company dreamler.com. Have since left the company in 2016. One of the really interesting findings is how challenging it is in practice to develop a robust algorithm to go from a large directed graph to a timeline for any decent sized graph.

@yWork ppl: Happy to share experiences if you are interested ;)

Answer 1

You can use the Properties Mapper tool to set the node locations to predefined values, for example set the year as x-coordinate. However, this does not provide a nice overall layout since the other coordinate is not changed at all.

@all: We're thinking about including such a layout algorithm in the future and would appreciate you sending an example of your data and the arrangement you would expect.

Comments

I've toyed with something like this using properties mapper but the results weren't all that great. A timeline layout algorithm would be great.

---

There are many different types of timeline layouts: https://www.google.de/search?q=timeline&tbm=isch. Please share some links to diagrams that are similar to the ones you need.

---

Hi Michael,
First type of timeline that makes sense (in my context anyway) is your typical gantt-chart layout. Ex: http://www.lsst.org/files/img/LSST_Timeline.jpg or a more space-saving variant of the same thing http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/b8b968af3ac06dbe4f2e245fb21e9d4a.png

The second type that makes sense is perhaps more of a time-line. Ex: http://www.nature.com/scitable/content/ne0000/ne0000/ne0000/ne0000/6638351/EssGen_KOmouseTimeline_LARGE_1.jpg or http://mishalov.com/images/9-11-timeline.gif
The later one being more interesting as it offsets the position and leader of event descriptions if several events are close together.

---

As a format and lay-out option I prefer the NetPoint (http://pmatechnologies.com/netpoint/) approach, which seems to line up nicely with the node/edge paradigm. This layout approach could really show off YEd's label positioning logic. Where start and end points could be nodes and there are two types of edges: tasks and dependencies. Another style would be to consider an effort as a whole to be a node, that would mean that a node would need to allow "weights" such as duration/effort.

---

I would also like the Gantt-chart-style timeline, that could automatically set up a horizontal time scale by year, month, week, or date, and then show below that, horizontal time-bars of different colors, representing SIMULTANEOUS events, one above the other. It should also display a grid if the user desires one.

---

Something new today with this feature (timeline layout algorithm) ?

---

SIMILE Timeline (http://simile-widgets.org/timeline/) has lots of examples of timelines.