PieTree

PieTree is a program for producing pictures of phylogenetic trees. Its main purpose is to display ancestral state reconstructions of discrete characters via pie charts (like Mesquite's "Ball & Stick" option, but prettier, I think). It doesn't do any kind of analysis—it just produces images.

Example output

Here are some examples of the images PieTree can produce. Output as EPS or PNG is also available.

You can tweak PieTree's output in many ways (see the manual below). For customized fine-tuning, you can edit SVG files in, for example, Inkscape or Illustrator, or you can use ImageMagick or pstoedit to produce other formats. Vector graphics look sharp and scale well, of course.

Download

The manual includes installation instructions for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. (Well, I hope to have functional instructions for all of those platforms!) PieTree is written in Python 2.5 using the Cairo graphics library, so those and pycairo are the dependencies. Options are passed with the configparse extension to Python's optparse module, which I've included.

Web Demo

I've also made an experimental web interface so that you can try out PieTree before installing it.

Acknowledgements

The first incarnation of PieTree was written by Walter Brisken. Here is his C code. I mentioned I wanted a tool to view trees with associated characters, and he had it working by the end of the day!

Boris Igic provided some beta-testing. I would be very grateful for feedback from anyone else who gives it a try.