Drawing pedigrees

I often work with data on relatives, where relationship between the individuals is inferred just from the pedigree. Up to now I did not plotted any pedigrees, except the simple ones, where I was able to use the pen and paper easily. However, when the number of pedigree members increases, the complexity of drawing increases enormously.

When I first googled for the term "pedigree", I got a lot of useless hits, but I surely followed the link on Wikipedia, where I learned something new.

The word pedigree is a corruption of the French "pied de grue" or crane's foot, because the typical lines and split lines (each split leading to different offspring of the one parent line) resembling the thin leg and foot of a crane.

Refining the search revealed a lot of good hits. It seems that there is a lot of competition in this area. That is good. However, the programs have many different options for many different kind of uses. Some areas are: genetic counselling, display of family trees, animal and plant breeding, ... Here are the links to the sites providing some more info about these programs: link1, link2, link3, link4, link5, link6, and link7.

I am particularly interested in animal breeding where pedigrees are large and complex. Drawing such pedigrees seems to be very complicated process (link1, link2, link3). Authors of Pedigraph claim that their program is good in this regard. They patented their innovation of summarizing the pedigree in order to gain some space for pedigrees with large half-sib families. The later are quite common in animal breeding. PedNavigator is also described as a program that can handle large and complex pedigrees, but its use is more for exploratory real-time usage, which is great, but not what I need - display the pedigree in one figure. There are very nice examples posted at Pedigraph site. This is a nice showcase for the Pedigraph programme.

Exploring a bit further (especially via link1, link2, link3, and link4) I realised that there is a general framework for drawing pedigrees, which are DAGs - Directed Acyclic Graphs, the Graphviz. Reading a patent behind Pedigraph once again, I found that they also talk about the dot language - used by the Graphviz software. Are they also using the Graphviz for the drawing of the pedigrees? The display looks very similar. Pedigree Visualizer, OPediT, PyPedal also use Graphviz for drawing the pedigrees. I guess that initially the programs try to optimize the pedigree in some way and then they construct the dot file, which is passed to Graphviz to do the drawing. I guess I will use Pedigraph for large and complex pedigrees and Graphviz directly for some small ones.