drawing trees with LaTeX

So, whatever you think about producing documents with LaTeX (personally, I'm pretty ambivalent, for reasons that I may go into later), if you want to draw parse trees with it, there's a nice package to do that: qtree.

Installing packages from CTAN manually looks hard.

If you're on Ubuntu/Debian, though, you just need to install these two packages: texlive-humanities, texlive-pictures.

qtree itself is in texlive-humanities, but it depends on a package, pict2e, that's only in texlive-pictures, so you have to install them both or it won't work.

And then you can draw some trees just by specifying the bracketing of the phrases (see the qtree docs for exactly how).