Using shapes and anchors

While rectangle and circle node shapes are available by default, others require loading the shapes package, as we did in the previous section.

We will explore many of them now.

A rectangle shape

A rectangle node has anchors in all compass directions, as we can see here, with a node named (n):

Figure 3.6 – Rectangle shape with anchors

In addition to these, we have a few more anchors available:

• center: The middle of the node, which is the default anchor.
• base: At the baseline of the node text and centered horizontally. It is helpful for the vertical alignment of text nodes. The base west and base east anchors are at the baseline height and on the west and east sides, respectively.
• text: At the left of the text baseline.
• mid: At half-height of the lower x and centered horizontally. It is also helpful for vertically aligning nodes with text that may have different heights and depths. Also, here,...