Drawing binary trees with LaTeX labels

Is there some good tool for drawing binary trees with labels that are rendered by latex? I would need to have the tree node placement done automatically for me, because there are too many labels to calculate their placing manually.

To be more specific. I can easily control the output format of my data. What I can't do is output into a format, where I have to calculate the coordinates for each node. I'd like to output the data into a format for a tool that can calculate the graph layout.

EDIT: I noticed that the solution below doesn't seem to accept math in the labels. For example the code below won't work, but if I drop the dollars around the label "x", then it will. This is a problem, because my labels are 2x2-matrices.

\documentclass[tikz,border=5]{standalone}
\usetikzlibrary{graphs,graphdrawing,arrows.meta}
\usegdlibrary{trees}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[>=Stealth]
\graph[binary tree layout]
{
root->{$x$->{}}
};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

• Similar problem is solved here or here using TkiZ. – Václav Pavlík Sep 27 '14 at 8:14
• @VáclavPavlík "too many labels" suggests that OP's tree may be considerably larger than in the answers cited. Just how well does tikz or tikz-qtree scale to large trees? – Brent.Longborough Sep 27 '14 at 8:45
• I have almost 100 nodes and the data changes fairly often, so I just mainly want to edit some labels and remove/add some links and then recompile. If I have to specify any coordinates, then I'll rather draw it with paintbrush. – Edvard Fagerholm Sep 27 '14 at 8:46
• @EdvardFagerholm Then could you bring us a full MWE? Is very hard to guess the solution blindly. – Aradnix Sep 27 '14 at 9:09
• For your edit, you need "$x$". All of these and much more is given in the PGF manual. – percusse Sep 27 '14 at 13:49

The most recent release of PGF has a number of graph drawing algorithms (requiring lualatex) including a version of the Reingold–Tilford method and can easily handle large numbers of nodes.

In the simplest case a tree can be specified like this:

\documentclass[tikz,border=5]{standalone}
\usetikzlibrary{graphs,graphdrawing,arrows.meta}
\usegdlibrary{trees}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[>=Stealth]
\graph[binary tree layout]{
a -> {
b -> {
c -> {
d -> { e, f },
g
},
h -> { i, j }
},
k -> {
l -> {
m -> { n, o },
p -> { q, r }
},
s -> {
v -> {w, x},
y -> {z}
}
}
}
};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}


It is also possible to create "graph macros" which mean the graph specification can be created more-or-less automatically, even using lua:

\documentclass[tikz,border=5]{standalone}
\usetikzlibrary{graphs,graphdrawing,graphs.standard,arrows.meta}
\usegdlibrary{trees}
\begin{document}
\tikzgraphsset{%
levels/.store in=\tikzgraphlevel,
levels=1,
declare={full_binary_tree}{[
/utils/exec={
\edef\treenodes{%
\directlua{%
function treenodes(l)
if l == 0 then
return "/"
else
return "/ [layer distance=" .. l*10 .. "]-- {" .. treenodes(l-1) .. ", " .. treenodes(l-1) .. "}"
end
end
tex.print(treenodes(\tikzgraphlevel) .. ";")
}%
}
},
parse/.expand once=\treenodes
]}
}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\graph[binary tree layout, grow=down, sibling distance=5pt, significant sep=0pt, nodes={fill=red, draw=none, circle, inner sep=2.5pt, outer sep=0pt}]{
full_binary_tree [levels=7];
};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}


• Stupid question, but how do you compile it? Just running "luatex file.tex" gives me this: ! Undefined control sequence. l.1 \documentclass [tikz,border=5]{standalone} ? – Edvard Fagerholm Sep 27 '14 at 10:33
• @EdvardFagerholm use lualatex not luatex – Mark Wibrow Sep 27 '14 at 11:10
• @MarkWibrow This is Tikzfu. Sad to see though pgf moving to lualatex. – Yiannis Lazarides Sep 27 '14 at 14:33
• Is it possible to make a version of the top picture that renders with pdflatex instead of lualatex? – Anush Oct 24 '18 at 16:13