Why is it with all the combined mac-love and technogeekery amongst phylogeneticists there isn’t a simple, friendly way to get my treefile into a presentable graphical form?
At present, it’s something torturous like from PAUP > Save As Pict. Then in Word, Import > Picture > File, and try to manipulate the individual bits. Until they start making random boxes, and I go blind.
All I want to do is colour code my taxa, add some node annotations, and not have to buy Illustrator! Photoshop won’t open the *.pict and let me manipulate the text, no matter what format it is converted to, because it rasterises the text.
TreeView wants me to save the file as an *.svg, which PS also doesn’t like. Searching Joe Felsenstein’s site, there appears to be some sort of program (TreeMe) which does these nifty things for the presentation of phylogenies, but it’s for PC! And also costs more than Illustrator.
Today I am Thwarted Lass.
TreeMe is a phylogenetic tree visualisation and manipulation software. It can unite bootstrap values or other statistical values (e.g. Bayesian support values from MrBayes) of several trees onto a single tree topology. You may also edit and manipulate trees if you need to test alternative tree topologies. One of the most important features is that with TreeMe a new tree format has been introduced wich uses tags and graphical features for nodes and branches. This is a great advantage on the quite simple NEXUS and PHYLIP formats. TreeMe also exports and imports trees in various formats including PHYLIP and PAUP (NEXUS) format.
Yes, it is true that there is a price for quality. However, once you have noticed how much time (and nerves) you can save in using TreeMe, you will end up with the conclusion that it is worth its price.
Best wishes,
Dominik Hepperle
http://www.sequentix.de