What is a creative way to display a family tree?

What is the best way to display the content of very large PDFs on a webpage? Convert to SVG?

• I have about 30 family trees exported from Family Tree Maker for Windows as PDFs that I want to display on a website. The issue is that they are quite large. I am trying to figure out the best way to display them online. They have already been resized so that each one fits on a page of A4 when printed, so they should be legible if expanded to fill the screen (any smaller and the text will be too small to read).  I am keen to maintain them as vectors so that (a) they will maintain a small file size even when the file dimensions are large, and (b) Google will still be able to 'read' the name of each person in the tree (so they are Google-able, as it were). This latter part is rather important. My current idea is to have a clickable preview thumbnail for each tree, and using Lightbox or equivalent, have them zoom to fill the screen, but unfortunately they are currently PDFs which I can't do this with. How can I convert them to SVGs? Will this maintain the text as text? Is this the best way to do it? In a perfect world I would also like to make some of the people within each tree, clickable so that I can link to the other trees where tehy also exist.  Any suggestions? I will be displaying them on a Wordpress blog.

• Answer:

  Quick techinical point: a PDF is a container for other file-types, but not a format itself.  Pictures inside of a PDF aren't in PDF-format, they're still JPGs or TIFs or EPSs or anything else.  So, in this case, it makes sense to realize that a PDF is just a locked EPS, which is itself just an Encapsulated PS file, which is the raw HTML-looking stuff that prints out when your printer has an error.  Anyway, similarly, PDF and SVG are not apples to apples.  So there is simply no advantage to converting your PDFs to SVGs. Since you understand vector graphics, I'll also mention that resizing them to A4 doesn't change the filesize (if that's what you were implying in your comment.) All that being said, if there are no graphics or hidden layers in your PDF, there may be nothing you can do.  If you have a full version of Acrobat (I'm not sure of the open source alternatives since I have Acrobat, but you could surely search http://sourceforge.net for some)—If you have a full version of Acrobat, you can use the Examine Document command to scrape off all the images or hidden layers, including possibly embedded color profiles or embedded fonts.  You can also Reduce File Size to make it compatible with only later versions of Acrobat—Acrobat Reader is one of those things that people update constantly, so you really don't have to make your PDF compatible with versions of Reader that are more than a few years old.  You will there be able to hyperlink the names, too.  But first you'll need to download a trial of Acrobat, or try the cloud version, or find an open source version. You're right that saving the whole thing as a GIF or JPG, then showing that in Wordpress, then having the thumbnail link to a lightbox of the PDF, would help the initial loading of the page (but would still take all that time to load the lightbox.)  And depending on what your lightbox supports, you may want end up converting to SVG to make that happen (if the lightbox supports SVG and not PDF—also don't overlook the weird vector formats that are commonly supported, like the ol' Windows WMF, but you are right that you'll have to research which are viewable by Google.)  There are surely GEDCOM-viewer plugins for Wordpress, like maybe a webtrees plugin?  Another less elegant solution is to upload your GEDCOM to various sites and see which one exports the best PDF for you to use. Anyway, keep the conversation going if it helps!