General design considerations

The user interface of TreeTEX has been designed in the spirit of the thorough separation of the logical description of document components and their layout; see [7,8]. This concept ensures both uniformity and flexibility of document layout and frees authors from layout problems which have nothing to do with the substance of their work. For some powerful implementations and projects see [1,2,11,13,14].

In this context, the description of a tree is given in a purely logical form, and layout variations are defined by a separate style command which is valid for all trees of a document.

A second design principle is to provide defaults for all specifications, thereby allowing the user to omit many definitions if the defaults match what he or she wants.

The node descriptions of a tree must be entered in postorder. This fits the internal representation of TEXtrees best. Although this is a natural method of describing a tree, a user might prefer more flexible description methods. However, note that instances of well defined tree classes can be described easily by TEX macros. In section . we give examples of macros for complete binary trees and Fibonacci trees.

TreeTEX uses the picture making macros of L^ATEX. If TreeTEX is used with any other macro package or format, the picture macros of L^ATEX are included automatically.