[comp.text] Trees in TeX/LaTeX

othar@CS.UCLA.EDU (03/11/88)

Has anyone solved this problem already?  If so, please send me the
answer.   

I need to put tree diagrams into a paper.  The trees look like:

                          d
                         / \
                        /   \
                       /     \
                      /       \
                     b         f
                    / \       / \
                   /   \     /   \
                  a     c   e     g

where a,g are arbitrary boxes filled with text.  Ideally I'd like to
specify this with something as simple as:

\tree{d}{\tree{b}{a}{c}}
	{\tree{f}{e}{g}}

or 

\begin{tree}
d
   \begin{subtree}
   b
      \begin{subtree}
      a	
      \end{subtree}
      \begin{subtree}
      c
      \end{subtree}
etc.

We could assume binary branching if that's easiest.  Could this be done
easily?  or has somebody done it already?  I know TeX is great at
vertical and horizontal layout, but it really doesn't handle the
diagonal at all, so I'm leery of diving into this.

Note: I have something that does

                    |--g 
            |---f---|
	    |       |--e
          d-| 
            |       |--c 
            |---b---|
                    |--a

but that's not as appealing.

Othar Hansson
( othar@cs.ucla.edu
  ..!{ucbvax|ihnp4}!ucla-cs!othar )