All Things Linguistic

I’ve seen a lot of hate in the #linguistics tag recently, especially concerning drawing syntax trees. The program I recommend to budding syntacticians and linguists for drawing trees is called TreeForm (by Donal Derrick, available for free on SourceForge).
It’s a drag-and-drop style program and you can use to produce images of trees, and go back and edit them later. It’s great for learning what kinds of structures to build, as well as building super-complex structures that would get confusing in markup languages like LaTeX or online sources like PhP Syntax Tree.
Actually, both of these other options are great, too. I would only recommend them for more advanced syntacticians and (proto-)linguists with a proclivity for programming or markup. In any case, happy tree-drawing!

Wow, TreeForm looks really nifty and easy to use. I wish I’d known about it earlier!

I used to use PhP Syntax Tree, which is better than using the line-drawing tool in Word (don’t do this! you’ll waste so much time!) but it still has quite a lot of limitations, like not supporting arrows or alternative fonts. The major annoyance that I found with it was having to re-download my trees as pngs every time I wanted to make one tiny change.

These days I use LaTeX, specifically the qtree package although I’ve heard that other packages are good too. Since I make all my linguistics docs in LaTeX, this lets me edit them right from within the document, which saves a lot of time.

It would be cool if TreeForm let you output some LaTeX code that you could copy-paste into a LaTeX file and tweak from there if necessary. So I probably won’t be using TreeForm myself for this reason, but I’d definitely recommend it to people who don’t use LaTeX.

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