Subject: review of arboreal for windows

review of : arboreal for windows , cascadilla press . by dr . matthew crocker ( mwc @ cogsci . ed . ac . uk ) centre for cognitive science , university of edinburgh . arboreal for windows ( henceforth , arborwin ) is a package designed to facilitate drawing trees within microsoft ( tm ) windows ( tm ) applications . arborwin consists simply of a truetype ( tm ) font in which keys are mapped to tree component shaped characters rather than standard keyboard symbols . the advantage of drawing trees in this way is that arborwin is very portable , and can be used in any wysiwyg windows ( tm ) application which allows you to select specific fonts ( i . e . most ) . the disadvantage , broadly , is that ` type-setting ' or layout of the trees is left to the user . the ` characters ' of arborwin include left , right , vertical , and ` triangle ' branches - - each of several widths ( but all the same height ) . the font is also fully scalable . in general , i found that arborwin behaved as intended , given that it is simply a font-based package . its most basic limitation is that there is a relatively small selection of branch sizes ( i . e . how narrow or wide a branch is ) . in practice , the most common problem i encountered was that ` triangle ' branches ( eg , for phrase without internal structure ) could n't be made wide enough . . . given that one often wants to put fairly long phrases under these . the only way to increase the width was to increase the point size for the branch ; but this also increases the height of the particular branch , and makes trees look disproportionate and inconsistent . being font-based , however , also means it cannot attain the flexibility of alternative packages ( eg , the ` tree ' package for latex ) . the ' tree ' package , for example , takes as input a declarative tree specification ( as a bracketed list ) and then automatically typesets the tree , and also permits crossing branches , and upside-down trees . since typesetting is automatic , the tree formatting is consistent , and tailored to the size / length of terminals ( including the triangle branches ) . overall the package is simple to use and quite effective if your requirements ( in terms of both sophistication , and layout quality ) are not too demanding . if greater flexibility , consistency , and quality is required , then i believe there is still no substitute for latex and its associated packages . dr . matthew crocker , esrc research fellow centre for cognitive science university of edinburgh mwc @ cogsci . ed . ac . uk
