I constructed huge long plain-text files, designed to be printed sideways. I had converted all my trees to this format by 1992. But again, I was not happy. It took far too long to edit the trees, and they were very unwieldy when I had to move people around and make other such fundamental changes. I realised that a narrative Burke's Peerage type format would have a fast turnaround in maintenance, allowing quick chopping and changing, but I resisted it because I still found it hard to read compared with graphical trees.
Hypertext changes everything.
Turning the jumps in the narrative Burke's Peerage format into hyperlinks finally makes the format easy to read and follow. And not just hypertext, it had to be hypertext on the Web . I had some vague idea that a program to jump around the trees would be good, but this was in the days of stand-alone PCs, when everyone would need their own copy of the program to read it. But now, when hypertext on the Web can be read by anyone, anywhere, on any PC or TV or mobile, moving off paper is far less scary. And I had to admit that paper was isolating too - the big graphical charts were impossible to photocopy, and people waited years for me to run off another printout for them.