How to keep different historical periods/events at the same horizontal line?

Q & A
#1

Hello everyone,

After two weeks of research, I chose Aeon Timeline to do my historical research and just bought the license. I know it’s a tool mainly targeting the writer community but I hope it can help me build my own historical map in the real world.

I love the interface after days of trying (I chose the historical template), it’s a bit overwhelming but I’ll keep learning. The biggest problem for me now is that I can’t find a way to put different historical periods/events at the same horizontal line.

Let me explain. So I would like to build a historical map of the recent 250-year world history based on major countries including the USA, Soviet Union, China, etc, as well as big events like World Wars, natural disasters, etc. In this way, whenever given an event, I can see how that event happened in a time “context” by understanding the real international environment around it.

For the major countries, I would like to divide them into different periods. Take the USA for example, I would like to divide it into 45 presidential periods because every president has different international policies. This way I can also investigate the interaction between countries by knowing how the leaderships overlap in the timeline.

But every time I added a newer president, the event jumped down to the next vertical position and all the presidents are now arranged in a chronicle order (vertically) and occupy a lot of vertical space. Ideally I should have a single event line divided into 45 segments to represent 45 periods of the USA, but I just don’t know how to do that.

I’ve tried so long in every corner of the software but I must have missed something. Can anyone point a direction to me so I can achieve what I want?

Any other good practices to build a timeline for historical research is welcome.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Acon

1 Like
#2

Currently in Aeon Timeline, the vertical placement of events is automatic. This is to keep them in order and to avoid overlaps, and to allow zooming. While there are three different layout options to determine when events are placed at the top vertically again, I don’t think any of them will work for your specific situation that you want.
We do have listed on our feature request voting page here: Feature Requests | Aeon Timeline an option for users to have more control over vertical placement of events for a fixed time scale.
In the meantime, one thing you could use instead of events for each presidential period is a calendar marker. Calendar markers appear at the top of the timeline, and highlight the section of the timeline that they correspond to. Here is an image of what they look like in our example timeline “Murder on the Orient Express”, which is a fiction timeline, but illustrates what they look like.

calendarMarkers
calendarMarkers1920×1040 329 KB

You can read about how to add them here: How calendar markers replace bookmarks - Aeon Timeline 3 Knowledge Base

#3

Hi Jess,

Thanks much for your reply. To be honest it sounds a bit surprising that it’s not possible to arrange events freely in Aeon Timeline. Such a feature is so important for historical timelines. I wonder how the screenshot on this page is achieved?

image
image1449×776 129 KB

And screenshot on this one? (can’t attach it here because I’m still a new user)

Regards,

Acon

#4

The first screenshot would have been achieved by two settings:

  1. Only displaying the Marker for each item. You can do this by clicking the “Customize item card” in the bottom left of the timeline, and choosing “Marker Only”. This reduces the events to just show their marker, and therefore will more likely to be compact.
  2. Choosing the “Compact” layout via the Timeline Layout icon (three dots) in the bottom left. This places items in the highest place they will fit, so it will take up less vertical space.

While these settings probably make it more likely that your events will align at the top, it is not guaranteed.

For the second one, do you mean the one under “Customise your timeline”? Or the first image?
The customise your timeline would be similar to the settings I mentioned above. The first image would have the two events aligned at the top just because of the horizontal gap between them. Depending on your layout setting, events will go back to the top if they don’t overlap with nearby events. It potentially also had the “Compact” or “Waterfall” layout setting.

#5

Hi Jess,

Thanks so much for these two tips. The “Compact” layout and “Marker Only” option might fit my need now. For the second link, I just noticed the first screenshot but the one under “Customise your timeline” does reflect my need better.

To control how events stack up horizontally at the same level vertical level, I think Aeon Timeline still needs to add a feature to let users arrange events freely, but for now, I found if I create a parent event (e.g. “USA”), and put all sub-events (e.g. all presidential periods) under it, together with the “Compact” layout and “Marker Only” option, the sub-events might stay together one by one nicely and no other irrelevant events will kick in to occupy their position. Does it make any sense?

There is a little glitch here: if I use this parent+child structure with the “Compact” layout and “Marker Only” option, the fold/unfold arrow button beside the parent event is not working anymore; the button disappears every time I move my cursor near it. Is that a fixable bug?

Thanks again for your help.

Regards,
Acon

#6

I also noticed that when I stack events in the compact view, short events become dot events if the timeline is zoomed out. That breaks the visualization and looks strange.

Is there any way to disable this behaviour and make events never become dots?

#7

No there isn’t a way to change this. The reason they become dots is because the length of the bar (when zoomed in more) shows the length of the event. The start of the bar is at the start date, and the end of the bar is at the end date. If you zoom out too much, then the length in pixels on the timeline becomes too small to draw the bar, and therefore a single dot is displayed.

#8

Thanks. How about this bug that I found? Any solution?

#9

Sorry I missed replying to the earlier bug that you reported.
Unfortunately we have been unable to replicate it, is it possible you would be able to send through a video of what is happening? You can email it to support@timeline.app
Also, what operating system are you using?
In the meantime, you can expand/collapse the selected parent) event via
Ctrl + Shift + up/down arrow (Windows) or Cmd + Shift+up/down arrow (Mac)

#10

Hi jess,

Thanks for the keyboard shortcut. That works fine, but it would be great if the bug can be fixed.

I recorded the screen as a GIF animation here. As you can see in the normal mode the expand/collapse button was clickable, but once I ticked “Marker only”, the button just dissappeared when my cursor got close to its position.

I use Windows 10 64bit.

Animation-

#11

Thanks for that. I’ll pass it onto our developers to look at.