Drawing a stemma with TikZ
Maïeul Rouquette has published an article on LaTeX-Community.org: Stemma with TikZ. It is an English translation of his three French blog articles about that topic.
A stemma codicum is a “family tree” of different manuscripts of a same text, see Stemmatics (Wikipedia). The article explains how to draw such a tree, which is also a method for constructing TikZ trees in general:
- For simple trees, use nodes, edges and children with the TikZ tree syntax
- For complex trees, you can go through these steps:
- Place the nodes, using coordinates or relatiive positioning, and give them names
- Apply styles for the nodes, choose or define your own styles for this
- Connect nodes by lines or arrows such as by draw[->] (node1) — (node2);
Once you have created such a tree, you could easily use this as a template for further trees, if you don’t like to go through such a construction process each time. Though some things seem to be complicated with TikZ, it’s easy to re-use and to adjust for similar drawings. For this, the TikZ example gallery can give good start code. It also provides some examples for TikZ trees.
