Drawing pedigrees.

At Integragen, we are working on genetic diseases using a large collection of individuals. Pedigrees are stored using a simple recursive SQL table:

+--------------+--------------+------+-----+------------+
| Field        | Type         | Null | Key | Default    |
+--------------+--------------+------+-----+------------+
| id           | int(11)      |      | PRI | NULL       |
| father       | int(11)      | YES  | MUL | NULL       |
| mother       | int(11)      | YES  | MUL | NULL       |
| svgX         | int(5)       | YES  |     | NULL       |
| svgY         | int(5)       | YES  |     | NULL       |
(...)
+--------------+--------------+------+-----+------------+

Although a colleague of mine wrote a paper about the art of drawing pedigrees, I wondered if I could use Graphviz/Dot in order to build the family trees. Using a SQL query transformed into DOT with awk, I was able to parse the X and Y positions generated by dot and to update my database. As those x/y coordinates are now in the tables, drawing the pedigrees in SVG is now easy.

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