linear2tree: Tiny web based linguistic utility to convert linear syntax representation into 2D syntax tree represenation

Warning: The source code is about 5 years old and is the result of my experiments with Common Lisp to help fellow linguists. I did not test it with current Lisp implementations, web servers, etc. but probably it will either work out of the box provided that you have an active SBCL system and allegroserve or will require minor modifications. And probably by now somebody should have created a more capable utility to solve the same problem (let me know). Nevertheless I decided to share it so that it may prove useful for some linguists and hackers out there.

This is a small linguistics typesetting utility to help eople who write linguistics papers and are in need of typesetting parse trees.

I myself was one of those people and tried to draw trees using drawing software which took much time and did not produce high quality output. However, later I realized that a linear representation of a parse tree such as:

[PP [Spec right] [P' [P across] [NP [Spec the] [N' [N bridge]]]]]

can be automatically translated to the traditional two dimensional tree form and included in a paper such as:

So I wrote a small program using Common Lisp programming language hoping it can help the linguistic research community and ease their job writing and typesetting beautiful papers.

The current shortcomings of program:

• It doesn't produce .pdf output.
• It is tested only for Turkish and English alphabet.
• The Turkish character set is only handled correctly for .png output. (due to some PostScript font problems).
• There are no ways to adjust the size and other parameters of the output.