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 selecting the Person object in the Objects list on Graph Tool’s Types page, clicking the right mouse button and selecting Edit Symbol from the popup menu. As creating symbols is just familiar vector graphics drawing, we skip some work here for now and import the symbol from a symbol library.

In the Symbol Editor, select Symbol | Import From Library... to open the Symbol Browser (as shown in Figure 3-10), choose the symbol called ‘Person’ from the list by double-clicking it (or by selecting it and pressing Import). After this the predefined symbol 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 the left mouse button somewhere on the unoccupied drawing area. The editor should now look like Figure 3-11.

The ‘First name’ and ‘Family name’ text fields there are currently just fixed text, and instead we want to link them to the corresponding properties in our Person object. Double-click the text ‘First name’ or select it and choose Format... from its popup menu to open the format dialog for the text element.

Currently, the Content source in the format dialog has the Text radio button selected, to show the fixed text that is in the text box in the middle of the dialog. We want to make our 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 3-12.

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 source of the lower text field to be the ‘Family name’ property.

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 3-13.

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