Spacing within and around nodes

We saw that rectangular node borders just fit nicely around the text. To understand how a circular node border fits around the node text: imagine a rectangle node for this text, and then the circle node border circumscribes that rectangle.

You can set a node option called inner sep to get more or less distance between the node text and border. To get more spacing around the border so the anchors are farther away, you can set an optional value called outer sep. It’s written in the following way:

\node[draw,rectangle,inner sep=1cm,outer sep=1cm] {n};

It is better to see it in a picture, so take a look with a default spacing node next to the n node:

Figure 3.10 – Spacing within and around a node

We can set horizontal (x) and vertical (y) distance separately; they are called xsep and ysep. With example values of 1cm and 0.5cm, the code changes to the following:

\node[draw,rectangle, inner xsep=1cm,inner...