Introduction

     Treetool is an interactive tool for displaying, editing, and printing phylogenetic trees.  The tree is displayed visually on screen, in various formats, and the user is able to modify the format, structure, and characteristics of the tree.  Trees may be viewed, compared, formatted for printing, constructed from smaller trees, etc...

    Treetool works with Newick format tree files (Paup and Phylip compatible).  It handles multifurcating trees, branch lengths (evolutionary distances), rooted/unrooted trees, and multiple trees per file.  It can print to a PostScript printer, or output PICT graphics for Macintosh drawing programs (MacDraw).

    Treetool 2.0.1 is available in binary form for Sun Sparc machines (Sun 4's) and in source form. Treetool requires X-windows (from MIT), and the Xview toolkit (from Sun
Microsystems).  Both are free (copyrighted) software, available readily from a number of sources (both are available by anonymous ftp to export.lcs.mit.edu).   

Usage 

    It takes as input a PHYLIP tree file, with branch lengths if they are provided, displays the tree in either rooted or unrooted form on any X-windows screen, and allows the user to modify the form of the tree and the placement of nodes and labels. When the tree is in final form the user can have it written to a Postscript or PICT file and/or printed to a Postscript-compatible printer. TreeTool is free as a C program for X windows using the Xview library. Xview seems to be available mostly on Sun workstations (it can also be installed on Linux).