Toxic Elephant

A LaTeX package for typesetting syntactic trees

Posted by matijs 07/11/2004 at 01h40

While studying linguistics, I often had to put pictures of syntactic trees in my papers about generative grammar. I made several systems to draw these automatically. One of these was a LaTeX package called synttree.

I actually uploaded the version from 1998 to CTAN. That version was clumsy, and the code was hard to read, a result of my struggles with TeX. I have always wanted to clean the package up, so it would be easier to extend it if needed.

In 2001 or so, I read an article from TUGboat that showed me how to write a parser that I could actually understand after I had written it. So, I wrote the new parser, and sort of bolted it onto the existing drawing macros.

Two days ago I finally came back to it. Now, I have a new working version, much more extendable and cleaner, ready to be uploaded to CTAN.

[Update Dec 9, 2004: The new version can also be found at CTAN.]

[Update Jun 11, 2005: Information on downloading and using the package has been moved to the synttree page.]