Re: supertree construction in perl

[pvaldes]

If you want to play with the nodes, calculate bootstrap values etc, start with bioperl

But if you want only to plot a nice tree with few nodes and non interactive, you have at least two superb options outside perl. Each time I see the plot that you want to make, something in my mind is whispering at me: this is clearly either a graphviz job...

use graphviz;
my $plot = GraphViz->new(
               layout   => 'dot', 
               directed =>  0, 
               rankdir  => 'TB'
               ); 
    # dot = directed plot as output, 
    # better than 'neato' for drawing trees

... or either a work for the ever elegant latex

use LaTeX::Driver;

(\usepackage{tikz}). Both can produce the plot that you want, after perl massage and pass the data in an accurate way. Of these, Latex is probably the only that can plot _exactly_ what you show in the picture, but don't underestimate graphviz, it is a solid and very powerful program

And if you have a big structure with many thousands or millions of nodes to plot, R is your man. Graphviz is not designed for this kind of situation.