Variable positions for group labels

[claumer]

Hello,

I was wondering if there is a way to draw taxon labels on a tree (as you did with the rectangular boxes in the tutorial on this subject), but allowing the labels to be staggered to different coordinate positions across the tree. For non-ultrametric trees where there's a lot of branch-length variation, the tips occupy quite different positions on the x axis. Currently I can only make the labels line up on a vertical line, which forces a positioning near the rightmost tip (on a rooted tree), and leaves a large amount of whitespace between the tips of many clades and the taxon label.

I'd appreciate any advice you have about a way to accomplish this!

Regards,
Chris L

[arklumpus]

Hi, thank you for pointing this out! This problem has actually come up frequently enough, so I have added a few more options to the Group labels module.

The module now has an additional Anchor option; if you set this to Farthest leaf and the Distance to 0, each group label will be drawn at the location of the farthest leaf descending from the node to which it belongs. You can then increase the Distance to add some margin, if necessary. However, by doing this you lose the ability to automatically prevent labels from overlapping.

Furthermore, if both Prevent overlap and Manual rows are disabled (or if Anchor is set to Farthest leaf), the value of the Distance can be set on a per-node basis (through attributes in the usual manner).

You should get a notification that updated modules are available today or tomorrow, but you can update now by clicking on the Module repository button in the Modules tab and finding the update in the Plot actions tab (or you can just run TreeViewer -I from the command line to update all modules).

I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any other questions!