Drawing medical pedigree trees with TeX and PSTricks

Abstract

Medical pedigrees look like genealogical trees, but also have certain interesting features. Usually they are drawn by hand by medical geneticists. This is a cumbersome and time-consuming process. Freely available programs for drawing genealogies are not fully suitable for this task because of the special format of medical pedigrees. We discuss a package for drawing pedigrees based on PSTricks. The information is input by geneticists in a spreadsheet; a Perl program extracts it and calls TeX to produce the final output.