Pre- and post-actions for using a path multiple times

We can have an arbitrarily complex path we want to use several times. TikZ provides an efficient way that spares us repeating coordinates.

Let’s look at the following path from Figure 7.4 from the previous chapter:

\draw[orange, line width=3mm]
  (90:2) -- (210:2) -- (330:2) -- cycle;

This draws an orange triangle:

Figure 8.1 – A simple triangle path

Let’s say we want to draw this path several times with different colors and line widths to get a nice striped effect. The straightforward way to do this is by repeating the \draw command, like so:

\draw[red, line width=5mm]
  (90:2) -- (210:2) -- (330:2) -- cycle;
\draw[orange, line width=3mm]
  (90:2) -- (210:2) -- (330:2) -- cycle;
\draw[yellow, line width=1mm]
  (90:2) -- (210:2) -- (330:2) -- cycle;

Those three commands give us the following triangle in a mix of red, orange...