Cyrillic is a program designed to display important information and structure in a clear way about a pedigree for human geneticists, clinical geneticists, genetic counselors and human molecular geneticists. We found it easy to learn and use. It is straightforward to draw a new pedigree since the editing of drawings is clear with simple selections of symbols. Importing files from other formats is somewhat cumbersome but manageable.

Compared with Cyrillic 1.1, the new version, Cyrillic 2, has improved a lot. Accessibility of tool-bar buttons and floating menus make it unnecessary to have the manual on hand all the time. Some of the impressive new features are listed below:

  1. 1

    Text annotations with choices of colors may be added anywhere on the drawing. This new feature improves the appearance and clarity of the drawing.

  2. 2

    The control of pedigree layout as well as the handling of imported files is better. For example, individuals are better spaced after importing moderate-size families.

  3. 3

    The option of reducing the whole drawing from 90% to 10% makes it a lot easier to view large pedigrees.

  4. 4

    Information about selected members of the family or all family members can be placed on the clipboard in a special format. Word for Windows or WordPerfect for Windows will accept such a format and convert it into a table.

  5. 5

    Regions containing pedigrees can be copied and pasted into Microsoft Word. It is handy to edit pictures by double clicking.

  6. 6

    Instead of adding one individual at a time, it allows adding a nuclear family.

  7. 7

    In printing, an option to fit a moderate-size drawing on a single page allows for a quick check. For larger pedigrees, the option of circular drawing is helpful for the purpose of presentation.

  8. 8

    Recombinations in haplotype bars are automatically generated by different colors and pattern.

  9. 9

    Cyrillic 2 handles consanguinity loops better than the previous version. We tested it using a file with ten loops, the drawing is clear after minor manipulations.

In spite of the good features and improvements mentioned above, there are a few drawbacks:

  1. 1

    Although it is easy to add family to nonfounders in the drawing, for large pedigrees, it occurs often that the newly drawn pedigree lines overlap with the old ones even when sufficient space is available. Unfortunately, there is no option such as ‘undo add’ to clear this.

  2. 2

    Cyrillic 2 gives equal allele frequencies to VNTR markers (not 0.01 as quoted in the manual p. 134). Therefore users must be aware that they need to edit the datafile (LINKAGE format) outside Cyrillic to avoid misleading results.

  3. 3

    There is only one pedigree allowed per single Cyrillic file (i.e. only one family identification number). In an attempt to import a moderate-size file (in LINKAGE format) with multiple pedigrees into Cyrillic 2, a system error occurs. In contrast, Cyrillic 1.1 was able to save several Cyrillic files when the same LINKAGE file was imported.

  4. 4

    When importing files, it is still troublesome for Cyrillic 2 to handle pedigrees with persons who married twice or pedigrees with more than one set of founders. Substantial manipulation is needed to get a clear picture.

  5. 5

    In Cyrillic 2, it is not possible to update marker information in a drawn extended pedigree on a large-scale basis. Marker information needs to be added to one individual at a time. For example, after a large pedigree with many markers is imported, the only way to add new markers to this pedigree is to edit individual marker one at a time.

  6. 6

    In order to run LIPED by the exported file created by Cyrillic, some editing is needed for the file to be in the right format. Several simple files from nuclear families were tried and we found that the penetrance and variable KONT were not set correctly.

Suggestion: To make Cyrillic 2 even more user-friendly, it would be useful to have warning messages about some known pitfalls. For example, since Cyrillic 2 does not assign haplotypes on a probabilistic basis, it would be useful to show a message indicating that ‘haplotype reconstruction is not probabilistic and may thus not be reliable’ for people working without the manual.