Forest

Introduction

1 Introduction¶

Over several years, I had been a grateful user of various packages for typesetting linguistic trees. My main experience was with qtree and synttree, but as far as I can tell, all of the tools on the market had the same problem: sometimes, the trees were just too wide. They looked something like the tree on the left, while I wanted something like the tree on the right.

Luckily, it was possible to tweak some parameters by hand to get a narrower tree, but as I quite dislike constant manual adjustments, I eventually started to develop Forest. It started out as xyforest, but lost the xy prefix as I became increasingly fond of PGF/TikZ, which offered not only a drawing package but also a ‘programming paradigm.’ It is due to the awesome power of the supplementary facilities of PGF/TikZ that Forest is now, I believe, the most flexible tree typesetting package for LaTeX you can get.

The latest stable version of Forest is available at CTAN. Development version(s) can be found at GitHub. Comments, criticism, suggestions and code are all very welcome! If you find the package useful, you can show your appreciation by making a PayPal donation to saso.zivanovic@guest.arnes.si.