Re: Drawing Trees

[Graydon <oak@uniserve.com>]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2005 at 12:09:05PM +0100, Mike Taylor scripsit:
> Does anyone know of any good software for drawing publication-quality
> figures of phylogenetic trees?  I need something that runs on Linux,
> but I don't really know where to start.  Many thanks in advance.

Assuming HP Holtz is correct (seems likely :) and that all you need is a
vector drawing program, Open Office (which very likely comes with your
Linux distro) has a Draw component.  It's a bit more general-purpose
than Illustrator or Corel Draw, but it's entirely serviceable and has
(unlike the other two) standards-compliant SVG export.

Sodipodi is a native-SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) drawing application.

xfig (and companion transfig) are venerable, but extremely reliable as a
2D vector drawing application.

There are a passel of KDE apps for this purpose, and at least one GNOME
one, and the two Visio clones-of-function, too.

If it was up to me, I'd be going with Draw; OASIS standard file formats,
excellent postscript and SVG output, and (unless the journal is making
you use LaTeX) you can probably do the whole paper in OpenOffice.