Shrink tikz trees

Question

How can I reduce the overall size of trees drawn by tikz-qtree? I've got a huge parse tree that doesn't even try to fit on one page. I'd like to either resize the full tree or tweak the placing algorithm to make the tree more dense.

Answer 1

Put the entire tree in a \resizebox from the graphicx package. Here's what the graphics guide has to say about this command:

\resizebox{⟨h-length⟩}{⟨v-length⟩}{⟨text⟩}

Scale text so that the width is h-length. If ! is used as either length argument, the other argument is used to determine a scale factor that is used in both directions. Normally v-length refers to the height of the box, but in the star form, it refers to the ‘height + depth’. As normal for LaTeX2ε box length arguments, \height, \width, \totalheight, \depth may be used to refer to the original size of the box.

\bigskip, \newpage, \hfill, and \hspace{0pt} are just used to make the example spacing look nicer. Note that in order for the vertical resizing to work, you need to put the \Tree in a tikzpicture environment. And of course, you can also just use 5cm as a length; I only included lengths related to typesetting dimensions in my examples.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage[a6paper,showframe]{geometry}% just to demonstrate the effects

\usepackage{graphicx}

\usepackage{tikz-qtree}

\begin{document}
\setlength{\parindent}{0cm}% get rid of paragraph indents for this example

%
% HORIZONTAL RESIZING FOR WIDE TREES
%

Original Size:

\Tree[.Top A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P ]

\bigskip

Full linewidth:

\resizebox{\linewidth}{!}{%
\Tree[.Top A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P ]
}

\bigskip

Linewidth minus 1cm:

\resizebox{\dimexpr\linewidth-1cm}{!}{%
\Tree[.Top A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P ]
}

\bigskip

Half linewidth:

\resizebox{.5\linewidth}{!}{%
\Tree[.Top A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P ]
}

\bigskip

%
% VERTICAL RESIZING FOR TALL TREES
%

Page 2: original size

Page 3: textheight, textheight minus 1cm, half textheight

\newpage

\begin{tikzpicture}\Tree[.A [.B [.C [.D [.E [.F [.G [.H [.I [.J [.K [.L [.M [.N [.O [. P ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]\end{tikzpicture}

\newpage

\hfill
\resizebox{!}{\textheight}{\begin{tikzpicture}
\Tree[.A [.B [.C [.D [.E [.F [.G [.H [.I [.J [.K [.L [.M [.N [.O [. P ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]
\end{tikzpicture}}
\hfill
\resizebox{!}{\dimexpr\textheight-1cm}{\begin{tikzpicture}
\Tree[.A [.B [.C [.D [.E [.F [.G [.H [.I [.J [.K [.L [.M [.N [.O [. P ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]
\end{tikzpicture}}
\hfill
\resizebox{!}{.5\textheight}{\begin{tikzpicture}
\Tree[.A [.B [.C [.D [.E [.F [.G [.H [.I [.J [.K [.L [.M [.N [.O [. P ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]
\end{tikzpicture}}
\hfill\hspace{0pt}

\end{document}