How TreeLine arranges your family

TreeLine's arrangement engine works in two passes. First, it assigns every person to a generation row based on their relationships — parents above children, spouses alongside each other. Then an optimiser rearranges people within those rows to reduce the number of connectors that cross, which is one of the main things that makes a chart feel cluttered or clear.

The optimiser considers many possible orderings and scores each one. It keeps the best arrangement it finds within a time budget, then hands the result to the renderer. This is why the same family may sometimes produce slightly different layouts after a re-arrange — the optimiser may find a better path through the search space.

You can influence the result by adjusting the arrangement quality setting: Fast is deterministic and instant; Balanced is the recommended default; Fine takes longer but produces the most refined result for print export.