dmsnell/graphviz-tree-graphs

A meta-language for simplifying the process of making sentence diagram trees in Graphviz

graphviz-sentence-trees

A meta-language for simplifying the process of making tree diagrams in Graphviz

How to use

The input file specifies a tree graph in Graphviz using a simplified syntax. This syntax makes it quick and easy to model the tree without having to memorize or lookup the Graphviz syntax.

There are five basic components in the input file:

1. Entire trees, denoted by a line containing only the word tree and no indentation
2. Nodes, denoted by a label following some level of indentation by tabs.
3. Annotated nodes, like above with but an annotation following the label after a separator -
4. Parent-child relationships, denoted by the increase in indentation level from one line to the next
5. Comment lines, denoted by no indentation and any content other than just tree

Dependencies

The actual parsing of the input file is a Python script, so make sure you have Python 2.7 installed. The output is generated by GraphViz, so make sure you have that as well and can run dot from the command line.

If you are on a Mac computer, you can install with the following:

brew install python graphviz

If you are running Linux, you will only likely need to install GraphViz, as Python should be included already.

apt-get install graphviz
# or
yum install graphviz
# or better yet 😉
emerge graphviz

Example graph

The following is a basic sentence diagram with the parts of speach as nodes and the words of the original sentence as annoted leaf-nodes.

Josie knew Abby was sometimes difficult.

tree
	S
		NP
			N - Josie
		VP
			V - knew
			S' - was
				NP - Abby
				ADV - sometimes
				ADJ - difficult	

Let's run it with the included run script:

./makeTree.sh example.tree

Now, let's look at our pretty graph!