Ralf Vogel

I rarely ever heard that anybody in linguistics was using these macros, so I didn't consider the closure of my old Stuttgart account (due to massive spamming) problematic. But then I was contacted by a couple of people, among them Christophe Costa Florencio, who is developing a nice GUI for LaTeX tree drawing. Much to my surprise I realised that xyling is used quite frequently. It grew a lot sice 2001. I'm glad that I found some time to write up a documentation and bring the file, which is now a style file (!), into a world readable format. I hope it will continue being useful. Please report any problems that you might experience with xyling.

Though originally intended for drawing GB-style syntax trees, the tool can do much more than that. In fact, the macros can be used to do any kind of graphics that combines text with lines, arrows circles, squares etc. The documentation contains some examples for extensions. If you made macros for other purposes which are based on xyling, I will happily include them. Just send them to me.

An important note for Mac users: It seems that the Mac program 'stuffit' has problems with opening the zip archive. For those who experience such problems, or have difficulty to read the downloaded files in an editor due to other operation system incompatibilities, here are direct links to the files xyling.sty, the style file containing all the macros, and xyli-doc.tex, the source of the documentation containing a couple of examples. You should at least be able to display these ascii text files in your browser.

Note that MacOSX has the command line commands zip and unzip which are the equivalents of the respective linux/unix commands which are used for zipping the package. These have been reported to work with the zip archive. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

Introduction

Drawing syntactic trees with LaTeX used to be a pain for me. The tool that I favored till 2000 was tree-dvips (documentation), written by Emma Pease. It provides macros for drawing trees and lines and arrows both within trees and within ordinary text.

The problem is that the package requires PostScript. You cannot see the lines in your .dvi file. It is also impossible to make them visible in a .pdf file created with pdflatex.

I often used a graphics program like xfig for this purpose, creating a tree in a picture environment. This environment has many limitations and often yields not very nice output.

Wolfgang Sternefeld's Linguex contains a quite sophisticated enhancement of tree-dvips called ps-trees (documentation). It still only produces trees in combination with a postscript interpreter.

The aesthetic results of these macro packages are not always convincing, compared to the time they take you. A lot of extra work is needed to keep trees symmetric, when the node entries have unequal width etc.

I found a way out, when I recognized a great graphics package, called xypic, written by Kristoffer H. Rose, which has been part of my LaTeX distribution ever since I work with LaTeX. It establishes a macro language that can create all sorts of weird mathematical graphics and diagrams, and, most importantly, it produces Metafont code, thus the graphics are visible in any file format.

I tried to make up some xypic based macros for tree drawing and called the results xyling (documentation). Get the xypic package, if you don't have it, from CTAN. Feedback, suggestions, bug reports appreciated.