Input

Output

Input Description: A tree (ie. graph without any cycles) \(T\).
Problem: A nice drawing of the tree \(T\).

Excerpt from The Algorithm Design Manual: There are as many reasons to want to draw trees as there are types of structures that trees represent. Consider software and debugging tools that illustrate the hierarchical structure of file system directories, or that trace the execution

The primary issue in drawing trees is establishing whether you are drawing free or rooted trees:

• Rooted Trees define a hierarchical order, emanating from a single source node identified as the root. Any drawing must reflect this hierarchical structure, as well as any additional application-dependent constraints on the order in which children must appear. For example, family trees are rooted, with sibling nodes typically drawn from left to right in the order of birth.
• Free trees do not encode any structure beyond their connection topology. For example, there is no root associated with the minimum spanning tree of any graph, so a hierarchical drawing can be misleading. Such free trees might well inherit their drawing from that of the full underlying graph, such as the map of the cities whose distances define the minimum spanning tree.

Implementations

Graphviz (rating 10)	treant-js (rating 7)
GraphEd (rating 7)	Combinatorica (rating 6)
pymag-trees (rating 5)	GED (rating 5)
Genocop (rating 5)

Recommended Books

Handbook of Graph Drawing and Visualization by R. Tamassia	Graph Drawing Software by Michael Jünger and Petra Mutzel	Drawing Graphs: Methods and Models by M. Kaufmann and D. Wagner
Graph Drawing: Algorithms for the Visualization of Graphs by Giuseppe Di Battista, Peter Eades, Roberto Tamassia, and Ionnis G. Tollis	Computational Discrete Mathematics: Combinatorics and Graph Theory with Mathematica by S. Pemmaraju and S. Skiena

Related Problems

Drawing Graphs Nicely

Planarity Detection and Embedding