Along with several other desperate users, I’ve commented on this subject under Mac & Windows (Desktop) / Export to web gone? but there I’ve reached the limit of 3 topic replies for “new” users.
I would like to share my use case, which should provide a good example of an Aeon Timeline user who doesn’t dare upgrade from AT2 to AT3 because the web-export functionality is the only viable option for sharing his work. If I somehow lose the ability to run AT2, I will no longer be able to share, in any useful or meaningful way, years of painstaking work.
Over the past 5 years, I have constructed a single timeline with over 950 “primary” events. Some of those events are themselves containers – parents for hundreds of secondary events. So the total number of events is well over 1000. Every single one of these events contains crucial explanatory text, including bibliographic references to an accompanying research document. (Thus, all 1000+ events must be expanded, or expandable, in any useful export, otherwise there’s no point in sharing it.) The vast majority of events also contain additional contextual explanations, interpretations, photos, and links to other documents.
This timeline spans about 300 years. Some individual events span decades. Other events span just a few minutes. (Yes, minutes.) When I work inside AT2, I am constantly zooming back and forth between a decadal scale and an hourly scale. Thus, for me to share this timeline in its entirety – which is the only meaningful way to share it – a useful export must be able to capture information distributed on scales that span many orders of magnitude.
Now let’s talk entities. Each of the above events is further defined according to several cross-cutting categories. The first category contains 13 non-exclusive entries. The second category, locale, has well over 100 entries. The third category, participants, is similarly vast. These categorical notations must also be depicted on each expanded event, again in order for an export to be useful.
When I expand every single event and then tell AT2 to export the entire timeline to PNG or PDF, it cheerfully reports that the image dimensions will be 11112 x 497685 pixels. After several minutes of churning on a 2022 MacBook Air, it generates a broken (un-openable) 550 MB png file. The pdf file is only 2.6 MB, but also broken. I know from previous experience that even if these files were viewable, they would be absolutely useless – the PDF file would translate to a printout that is many feet long, covered with unreadable 1pt typeface everywhere.
I’ve been using Aeon Timeline for years because it is an amazing, fantastic tool. Not only has it become absolutely essential to my workflow, but it made a previously impossible project possible. But I am tethered to the web-export functionality of AT2, and worried that I may lose the ability to meaningfully share this very time-consuming project.
If there is a workaround in AT3 that can genuinely handle my use case, I’d be happy to learn about them. But, to date, none of the workarounds that have been suggested to me are even remotely feasible for me (or, at the very least, I’ve failed to get them to work).
Although there have been some communications from AT support (thank you!) that the web export feature is being developed, or at least considered, for AT3, it’s not listed on the feature request page. Is it still in the future for AT3? If so, is there a rough estimate as to when it might roll out?