Drawing a tree with bottom-aligned leaves

Question

I'd like to align all leaves of a tree at the bottom, so what I'd like to achieve should look like:

    p
   / \
  /  /\
 c  d  e

What I've tried so far (using tikz-qtree) results in:

    p
   / \
  c  /\
    d  e

I'm currently using tikz-qtree, but if there's an alternative better suited to the task, feel free to suggest one ;) Sidenote: I'm actually not labeling nodes, but edges.

Code:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[active,pdftex,tightpage]{preview}
\usepackage{tikz-qtree}
\PreviewEnvironment[]{tikzpicture}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[every tree node/.style={draw,circle},sibling distance=10pt,
edge from parent path={(\tikzparentnode) -- (\tikzchildnode)}]
\tikzstyle{every node}=[font=\tiny, sloped,anchor=south,auto=false,inner sep=1pt]
\Tree
[.{}
    \edge node[]{C};
    [.{}
    ]
    \edge node[]{A};
    [.{}
        \edge node[]{D};
        [.{}
        ]
        \edge node[]{E};
        [.{}
        ]
    ]
]
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Welcome to TeX.SX! Please add a minimal working example (MWE) that illustrates your problem. It will be much easier for us to reproduce your situation and find out what the issue is when we see compilable code, starting with \documentclass{...} and ending with \end{document}. — jub0bs, Jun 13 '13 at 09:44
A related question: How to draw syntactical trees with parallel leafs for a natural language? Will this question solve your problem? — Alan Munn, Jun 13 '13 at 12:12

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 13 '13 at 10:04

This code generates what you need:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{trees}

\begin{document}
    \begin{figure}
        \begin{center}
        \tikzstyle{level 1}=[level distance=1.5cm, sibling distance=2.5cm]
        \tikzstyle{level 2}=[level distance=1.5cm, sibling distance=2.5cm]
        \tikzstyle{level 3}=[level distance=1.5cm, sibling distance=1cm]
        \tikzstyle{level 4}=[level distance=1.5cm, sibling distance=2cm]
            \begin{tikzpicture}
            \node {p}
                child{
                    child{
                        node(a){c}
                    } child{edge from parent[draw=none] }
                }
                child{
                    node{}
                    child{
                        node(b){d}
                    }
                    child{
                        node(c){e}
                    }
                };
            \end{tikzpicture}
        \end{center}
    \end{figure}
\end{document}

enter image description here

Credits to this page.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 21 '15 at 01:20

Here's a forest solution which allows the tree to be specified quite concisely. Once the preamble of the tree is configured (which could also be saved as a style, for example), we can write

  [
    [c]
    [a
      [d]
      [e]
    ]
  ]

to produce

The alignment of the final nodes in the tree is accomplished with

    if n children=0{tier=terminal}{},

Complete code:

\documentclass[tikz,border=10pt,multi]{standalone}
\usepackage{forest}
\begin{document}
\begin{forest}
  for tree={
    draw,
    circle,
    delay={
      if level=0{}{
          edge label/.wrap pgfmath arg={node [font=\tiny, sloped, midway, anchor=south, auto=false, inner sep=1pt] {#1} }{content()}
      },
    },
    if n children=0{tier=terminal}{},
    s sep=10pt,
  },
  before typesetting nodes={
    for tree={
      content=,
    }
  }
  [
    [c]
    [a
      [d]
      [e]
    ]
  ]
\end{forest}
\end{document}

Drawing a tree with bottom-aligned leaves

2 Answers2