Neglected phytools functions I: roundPhylogram

I'm not sure that this is destined to become a series, but in performing my latest “major”/minor update to phytools (and seeing as so doing meant modifying almost every source file in the phytools package), I stumbled across more than a few phytools functions that I'm not sure I've ever seen used outside the pages of this blog.

Here's one that I particularly like: roundPhylogram.

This function plots a tree with rounded (parabolic, more precisely) edges. Here's what I mean by that:

library(phytools)
data(anoletree)
roundPhylogram(anoletree,ftype="i",lwd=1,fsize=0.8)

As is commonly true, we get a nicer looking figure - that is, one without aliasing - if we export directly to a PDF:

pdf(file="roundPhylogram-Anolis.pdf",width=7,height=11)
roundPhylogram(anoletree,ftype="i",lwd=1,fsize=0.7)
dev.off()

## windows 
##       2

which can be seen here.

If we want to ignore branch lengths, as is commonly done for this type of tree plot - well, we might call that a round

roundCladogram<-function(x,...){
    x$edge.length<-NULL
    roundPhylogram(x,...)
}
roundCladogram(anoletree,ftype="i",lwd=1,fsize=0.8)

In fact - this function has been used once in publication, to my knowledge - though I'm not sure it counts if you use it yourself…..