A LibreOffice Draw GEDCOM import filter

You may remember that I wrote about my little ged2dot project about two months ago. It’s a Python script that can be used from commandline with quite some options. I’m happy to announce that there is a GUI for it now, in the form of a LibreOffice Draw import filter. If you open this GEDCOM file, you’ll see something similar to the above image. You can simply build the .oxt from the Git repo, or just get it from the LibreOffice Extensions site.

Technical details for the interested readers: the import filter just glues together existing pieces. First it runs ged2dot, then dot to generate an SVG. To keep things simple, then the filter "inlineizes" all the included images, finally the already existing SVG import filter does the real work. I find it elegant that each step works from and to the memory, and not ugly temporary files. :-) It works on Linux and Windows, feedback on if it works on Mac is appreciated.

Also, if you ask why this is an extension, not part of LibreOffice core: I guess most users are not interested in building family trees; also being someone who works on the core most of the time, I wanted to try out how implementing an import filter as an extension (filter detection, import options dialog, etc.) works. ;-)