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Blank Canvas & Drawing Tools

Besides tracing existing figures, Treemble lets you sketch trees from scratch.

1. Open a Blank Canvas​

File ▾ → Open Blank Canvas
Treemble loads a 2000 × 2000 px white sheet where you can sketch a tree and place nodes. This is useful to quickly generate a newick file with a certain topology in order to test phylogenetic hypotheses, etc.

2. Draw Menu​

A new Draw ▾ dropdown appears:

OptionCursorUse
Pencil✏️Freehand strokes
Line📏Straight lines
Eraser🧽Circular erase tool
Clear🗑️Wipe the sketch layer

Drawing tools screenshot

Undo / Redo for Drawing​

When using the drawing tools (Pencil, Line, or Eraser), you can undo and redo your strokes:

  • Ctrl+Z (or Cmd+Z on macOS): Undo the last drawing stroke
  • Ctrl+Y (or Shift+Cmd+Z on macOS): Redo the last undone stroke

3. Converting Sketch to Tree​

After sketching:

  1. Add Tip/Internal/Root nodes on top of your strokes.
  2. Detect Tips should work to add tips automatically, as long as your tips are oriented to the right.
  3. Click Show Tree — branches should match your lines.
  4. Proceed just like an imported image (tip names, Newick, etc.).

Clearing the sketch vs clearing the canvas​

Clear removes the sketch lines but not any nodes placed on the canvas. To clear the sketch and the nodes, simply choose File ▾ → Open Blank Canvas again.