How to create a timeline with LaTeX?

Question

In history-books you often have timeline, where events and periods are marked on a line in the correct relative distance to each other. How is it possible to create somethin

Answer 1

There is timeline.sty floating around.

The syntax is simpler than using tikz:

%%% In LaTeX:
%%% \begin{timeline}{length}(start,stop)
%%%   .
%%%   .
%%%   .
%%% \end{timeline}
%%%
%%% in plain TeX
%%% \timeline{length}(start,stop)
%%%   .
%%%   .
%%%   .
%%% \endtimeline
%%% in between the two, we may have:
%%% \item{date}{description}
%%% \item[sortkey]{date}{description}
%%% \optrule
%%%
%%% the options to timeline are:
%%%      length The amount of vertical space that the timeline should
%%%                use.
%%%      (start,stop) indicate the range of the timeline. All dates or
%%%                sortkeys should lie in the range [start,stop]
%%%
%%% \item without the sort key expects date to be a number (such as a
%%%      year).
%%% \item with the sort key expects the sort key to be a number; date
%%%      can be anything. This can be used for log scale time lines
%%%      or dates that include months or days.
%%% putting \optrule inside of the timeline environment will cause a
%%%      vertical rule to be drawn down the center of the timeline.

I've used python's datetime.data.toordinal to convert dates to 'sort keys' in the context of the package.