Timelines, family trees and other structured diagrams
A family tree, a timeline, an organization chart, a table of who ruled what and when: these are reference diagrams, and readers of long fiction, histories, biographies and series consult them constantly. They share one structural problem that has nothing to do with their content.
They are wide. A book page is tall. Everything that goes wrong follows from that.
The four ways to fit a wide diagram
Each of these is used in real books, and each costs something. The trick is picking the loss you can afford rather than discovering it at the proof.
Rotate it ninety degrees. The diagram is set sideways on a single page and the reader turns the book to read it. This is common, entirely accepted in reference works, and mildly annoying — which is the whole trade. The convention is the same as for a landscape table: the top of the diagram faces the outside edge of the page, so the book turns clockwise. See Tables, charts and data in a printed book for the rotation convention in full.
Break it into sections across several pages. Generation by generation, or century by century. The type stays readable, and the reason the diagram existed is destroyed: you can no longer see the whole shape at once. A reader holding three pages in their head to work out that two characters are cousins would have been better served by a paragraph.
Redesign it vertically. The right answer more often than people expect, because it works with the page instead of against it. A family tree becomes an indented list — each generation one indent deeper, marriages noted on the line, dates in parentheses. A timeline becomes a column with dates down the left and events to the right, which is a two-column table and sets like one. You lose the drawn lines and the visual sweep; you gain a diagram that fits, sets in the book's own typeface, and survives conversion to an ebook intact.
Shrink it and keep the drawn form. The tempting option, and where people go wrong, because it still looks right on a monitor at 200 percent. What shrinks with it is the type.
The type rule
Every label has to be readable at printed size. Not on screen, not in the PDF at whatever zoom you opened it at — on the paper, by someone holding the book.
The fastest check is also the oldest: print that one page at actual size, with scaling off and "fit to page" unticked, and look at it at arm's length in ordinary light. Ten seconds, and it settles the argument. If you are squinting, so is every reader over forty.
As a working limit, nothing in a diagram should fall more than a point or two below the body text size — the rule tables follow, for the same reason, and Type size, leading and the line that reads well has the sizes. Print-on-demand reproduction is the second reason: hairlines and very small type are the first things to go soft on uncoated paper.
When the type rule and the drawn form conflict, the form loses. A tree nobody can read is not a tree.
In the Interior Formatter. A diagram can go in as an inline image or a full-page plate, checked against the size it will really print at, with its alt text carried through into the EPUB — so the same file works in both editions. Start your interior → · about the Interior Formatter
The spoiler trap
This one catches fantasy and saga writers specifically, and it is not a layout problem at all.
A family tree in the front matter is a list of answers to questions the book is about to ask. It shows who marries whom, which is the plot of the first three hundred pages. It shows a death date, which is the ending of a character the reader has not met. It shows a child whose parentage is revealed in chapter forty.
Three fixes, in order of how often they are right. Put the diagram in the back matter, where a reader who wants it will find it and a first-time reader will not stumble into it — Glossaries, appendices and other back matter covers that end of the book. Or cut it back to what is known at the start of the book, and print a fuller version in the next volume; in a series that compounds nicely, since each book then carries the tree as it stands when that book opens, which is a useful recap in itself. Or drop the dates, which is where the damage usually concentrates.
Keeping it true after a revision
A reference diagram is a claim about the text, and the text moves. You cut a brother in the second draft, change a date in copyedit, rename a house — and the diagram, which lives in a separate file made by a different tool, says what it always said. Nobody proofreads a picture.
Two habits prevent it. Keep the source of the diagram, not just the exported image, so changing it is an edit rather than a rebuild. And as the last step before you typeset, check the diagram against the manuscript, name by name and date by date. If you keep a style sheet or a series bible, what the tree asserts belongs in it — see The style sheet: how a series stays consistent and The series bible, and what it saves you. A tree with a dead character alive in it is a review.
In the ebook, it is an image
Reflowable text flows; an image does not. A timeline exported as one picture arrives scaled to a phone screen, which for a wide diagram means illegible, and the reader can pinch to zoom in some apps and not in others.
So do two things. Supply a simplified version for the ebook — fewer branches, heavier lines, larger type — rather than the print file. And write alt text that conveys the structure, not the appearance: a list of who descends from whom is far more use to someone listening than "family tree diagram". Reflowable text, and the things that break it explains why the image cannot behave any other way.
A vertical, list-shaped diagram sidesteps all of this, because as real text it reflows, resizes and can be read aloud. That is the argument for redesigning rather than rotating, if you were still weighing it.
Typeset your book
The Interior Formatter is free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript, and it sets real pages you can read before you commit to anything. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Maps and diagrams inside a book · More: Tables, charts and data in a printed book · The back of the book is where your next sale is · Putting images inside a book