Just recently I convinced a friend of mine to use LaTeX for her papers. A huge step for her and a small one for me as I just had to copy my templates and show her a few hints about LaTeX. Well, that’s what I thought. It was actually even the very same day when she asked me for help: she needed an image in there. That was of course easy but when I saw it I felt like I needed to replace it (it was seriously awfull). So, drawing…
She needed three rectangles connected with arrows. Easy thing with pstricks one might think but then pstricks is a PITA when you need a pdf document. So I tried tikz (of course, Debian delivers it right away). And see how “easy” that looks like:
\begin{figure}[htbp] \centering \begin{tikzpicture} [<->, auto, block/.style = {rectangle, draw=blue, thick, fill=blue!20, text width=3.5cm, text centered, rounded corners, minimum height=2cm, font=\sffamily}, line/.style = {draw, thick}] \matrix [column sep=5mm, row sep=2cm] { % row 1 & \node [block] (top) {Rectangle A}; \\ % row 2 \node [block] (left) {Rectangle B}; & & \node [block] (right) {Rectangle C}; & \\ }; \begin{scope}[every path/.style=line] \path (left) -- node [midway,font=\sffamily\footnotesize] {Arrow desc 1} (top); \path (left) -- node [midway,font=\sffamily\footnotesize] {Arrow desc 2} (right); \path (top) -- node [midway,font=\sffamily\footnotesize] {Arrow desc 3} (right); \end{scope} \end{tikzpicture} \caption{My fancy image} \label{fancyimage} \end{figure}
Don’t you like it that way?