Dan Jacobson and Steven Clark have raised ways of getting around the tendency
of the DRAWTREE program in PHYLIP to put species labels on top of each other if
the tips are close together on the tree. I hope to ameliorate some of this a
bit in the next release of PHYLIP. Steve Clark mentioned the option of writing
out the tree in HPGL format without labels, then reading it into the
widely-available grpahics format conversion package Hijaak and making it into a
format that a drawing program can use. DRAWTREE also can write a .PCX file that
can be read by PC Paintbrush, but I have just been told it writes the tree
white-on-black instead of black-on-white! (A correction will start being
distributed shortly). We hope to add MacDraw PICT format in the next release
as well.
Another alternative is the newly announced program TreeTool from Steve Smith's
GDE sequence alignment package, which is in X-windows code for Unix systems.
There was an announcement very recently in this newsgroup of a beta-release
by ftp of Sun binaries. I have played with TreeTool: it is great fun and
lets you re-orient branches at will. It is worth looking into.
I'd be happy to have more suggestions as to what to implement in the PHYLIP
DRAWxxxx programs as well.
-----
Joe Felsenstein, Dept. of Genetics, Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195
Internet: joe at genetics.washington.edu (IP No. 128.95.12.41)
Bitnet/EARN: felsenst at uwavm
UUCP: ... uw-beaver!evolution.genetics!joe
