As Person is a concept we are going to use in our graphical representations of family trees, we need to define a graphical symbol for it. You can start the Symbol Editor by pressing the Symbol Editor button in the Object Tool toolbar. As creating good looking symbols from scratch may take a while, we skip some dirty work here this time and load the symbols from a symbol library.

In the Symbol Editor, select Symbol | Browse Library..., choose the symbol called ‘Person’ from the list and press Paste & Close. After this the predefined symbol template is pasted into the editor. Its elements are currently selected so that they can be moved around with the mouse. Move the elements to the position you like and press the left mouse button. Please note that after this the elements still remain selected, so you may want to deselect them by clicking left mouse button somewhere on the unoccupied drawing area. The editor should now look like Figure 3-5.

We must, however, link the ‘First name’ and ‘Family name’ text fields to the corresponding properties we added to our Person object. Click the text ‘First name’ and press the right mouse button. The text field gets selected and a pop-up menu will be shown. Select Format... from the pop-up menu as in Figure 3-6.

A format dialog for the text field will open. Currently, the text field is showing the fixed text that is entered into the text box in the middle of the dialog. However, what we want to do is to make the text field show the value of the ‘First name’ property instead. To do this, click the Property radio button and choose ‘First name’ from the pull-down list next to it, as in Figure 3-7. Accept these changes and close the format dialog by pressing OK. The name of the selected property type now appears in the text field. In a similar way, set the content of the lower text field to be ‘Family name’.

After assigning the properties to the text fields, there is still one more thing to do. We must define the connectable area for our symbol, i.e. a perimeter the incoming connection lines will stop at. In this case the default connectable is suitable for our purposes, so you can let MetaEdit+ generate it for you by selecting Symbol | Save or by pressing the Save button in the Symbol Editor toolbar. A connectable will appear around the symbol elements as in Figure 3-8.

The symbol is now ready and saved, so you can close the Symbol Editor by selecting Symbol | Exit or closing the editor window. You can also close the Object Tool.