Timeline Software Recommendations

[Rob_Haines]

I asked this on Mastodon last week, but no-one had any suggestions, so given the number of historians on here I thought it might be worth asking:

Can anyone recommend me an offline horizontal timeline-making tool?

I'm looking for something akin to TimelineJS or Tiki Toki, to visualise some periods of my life, but given the current state of internet scraping I don't particularly want to upload a bunch of personal info to someone else's server.

I'm not after Gantt charts or vertical-scrolling timelines, but most of the search engine results I've found assume I want project management or fancy websites.

Any thoughts?

(Open source would be ideal, but I'm absolutely willing to buy a reasonably-priced product if it's good enough.)

[Jubal]

I just realised I'd never replied to this. I think "how fancy do you want it" is the main thing I'm thinking: like, what would you envision the output looking like?

[Rob_Haines]

Ultimately, it doesn't need to be that fancy; this isn't intended as a presentational tool. But not being abhorrent to the eye wouldn't be the worst thing

(Someone suggested jury-rigging an Excel spreadsheet to chart it, and that's probably on the side of being both "a pain in the ass to upkeep" and "ugly as sin")

The example I've been using is Tiki Toki:

(though even this is perhaps more fancy than I need; the multiple aligned timelines would defintely be a boon to my visualisation, though)

[Jubal]

This is still on my list to think more about: there must be a simple way to do this, and if there isn't then it shouldn't be beyond the wit of mankind to code one. It'd be interesting if one could make the underlying scales flexible too: I was reading some of BagaturKhan's very extensive worldbuilding notes over in the writing area earlier and it'd be fun to have something that was effective for e.g. timelining one's fantasy setting.

How does that multiple aligned timelines feature work more exactly?

[Rob_Haines]

Essentially, you input individual events (with a Title, Start Date, End Date, and a user-defined Category, then it presents each unique category in a separate row. All the rows scroll horizontally together, wherever you click on the page.

The only real complexity is that since it's possible to have events that occur over a period of time, more than one event can be occurring in a particular category at the same time, so they have to stack vertically within a row.

In my wanderings since the original post I've also come across Aeon Timeline, which seems to be a legitimate option in terms of worldbuilding notes and so on, so I'm considering giving that a try at some point. (Though again, it's probably overkill for my use case.)