Creating timelines

Over the last few weeks I have been looking for a way to create a graphical 'timeline' in order to improve on the handcrafted, time consuming, text only method I currently employ.

Having not been able to find a suitable Drupal module I spent quite some time searching for alternatives.

When it comes to historically orientated 'timeline' applications I found the choice very limited indeed. My preference for open source applications further limited my options. When choosing open source applications I try to pick out one that appears to be under active development in the hope that future development will continue. This is not always easy to judge, so when eventually I came across EasyTimeline I realised I had probably found the application I had been looking for.

According to the EasyTimeline project site:

"EasyTimeline is also an integral part of the MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia."

EasyTimeline is developed by Erik Zachte though for uses outside of WikiMedia it also requires Ploticus for the actual plotting and Nconvert to convert the graphical output to the smaller file size png format.

Hopefully development will continue and the command line/script based interface will be improved upon. The script syntax is not difficult to pick up, though constructing the scripts is just a little tedious. This is not intended as criticism and I express my sincere gratitude to all developers of open source software. It would take me several lifetimes to develop my own.

At the moment I cannot apply a style sheet to the output nor does the script support unicode or specific fonts, though I understand this is under development. I also found this 'Timeline Editor' at 'NEWPED2'. This form is a front end for creating scripts for use with EasyTimeline, though I have yet to try it.