Timeline from a list of dates
Paste the events, one per line like «1492 | Discovery of America» (BC dates too), and out comes a clean timeline in SVG or PNG, to print. The spacing can be proportional to real time or equal. Your events never leave the browser.
Who it is for
Students preparing an essay or revising history, teachers building a worksheet, anyone telling the chronology of a project or a life. It is much searched for, also as a learning-support tool for pupils with specific learning difficulties, who remember better seeing time laid out on a line rather than in a list.
Proportional or equal: two different drawings
In the proportional one the distance between two events respects real time: there is more space between 1861 and 1969 than between 1789 and 1799, and you see at a glance where history speeds up. In the equal one the events are at a fixed step, one after the other, and it is more readable when dates are very close or very far apart. The choice is yours, and it is stated: they are two ways of telling the same chronology.
The dates: years, days and BC
You can write just the year («1492»), a full date («14/07/1789» or «1789-07-14»), or a year before Christ by adding «BC» («753 BC»): years before Christ are placed in the right spot, before zero. Lines with no readable date in front do not break everything: they are skipped and declared, so you can fix them. Events sort themselves from oldest to newest.
Why the labels do not overlap
The typical fault of a timeline drawn by a program is one label on top of another when two events are close. Here the width of each label is measured on the real text (not estimated by characters), and the labels are laid out alternating above and below the line, moved onto more rows until no pair touches. It is the same geometric test as Concept map: the guarantee is not «looks fine», it is «no box touches another».
What it does not do
It is not a concept map with relations between branches (for that there is Concept map): it is a line, that is time. If there are really many events the proportional one can squash them when one is very far from the others (an isolated date in the future): in that case the equal one is better, and the page lets you choose. To work out the years between two dates there is Difference between dates.