Mavric -- a module for manipulating and visualizing phylogenies
---------------------------------------------------------------

Q: What is Mavric?
A: MaVRiC Visualizes Rick's Cladograms!

See <http://www.bioinformatics.org/mavric>

For installation instructions read the file INSTALL included with this
release.

Viewing/editing a tree is as simple as executing (from the
source installation directory):

  ./bin/mavric <treefile>
  
where <treefile> contains nothing but a tree in Newick (aka New
Hampshire, aka parenthetical) format.  A sample treefile is included
in the release.  If multiple trees are present in the treefile only
the first is displayed.  Please note: Mavric _does not_ parse NEXUS
files yet.  It will parse PHYLIP treefiles nicely however.

The user interface
------------------

* Double-clicking or clicking with mouse-3 on a tree branch will pop
  up a menu of operations to perform on that particular branch.  These
  include branch rotation, length adjustment, grafting trees from other
  treefiles, etc.

* Branches can be moved around by dragging them onto other branches.
  Holding down the shift key while dropping a branch will swap the
  positions of the dragged and dropped branches, instead of the usual
  prune-and-graft procedure.


A note about printing trees
---------------------------

* The current 'Save as PostScript' feature is rather primitive.  To
  produce better-looking figures from the PostScript produced by
  Mavric, you can use pstoedit, a utility for converting PostScript
  files to editable vector file formats.  My format of choice is for 
  Sketch, a python-based drawing program for Unix/X11
  (http://sketch.sourceforge.net).
