Fancy tables with TikZ

Today I wanted to create a table for a presentation and I remembered a suggestion made by Kjell Magne Fauske in comp.text.tex in August 2008, to use TikZ to create tables with rounded corners. I’ve investigated this idea further to achieve a colorful table layout in a shape that’s unusual for LaTeX. Here’s the result, displaying a ranking of Linux distributions produced by DistroWatch.com:

fancy tables with TikZ

Click on the image to see it bigger, for a complete view open the pdf presentation.

The table has been put into a TikZ node, both at the top and at the bottom of the table I’ve used rectangles with rounded corners and some shading. A third rectangle is used to overlay parts of the other two rectangles.

The complete source code:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{default}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{colortbl}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{calc}
\pgfdeclarelayer{background}
\pgfdeclarelayer{foreground}
\pgfsetlayers{background,main,foreground}
\setbeamertemplate{background canvas}[vertical shading]%
  [top=blue!1,bottom=blue!30]
\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}
\newcommand*\up{\textcolor{green}{%
  \ensuremath{\blacktriangle}}}
\newcommand*\down{\textcolor{red}{%
  \ensuremath{\blacktriangledown}}}
\newcommand*\const{\textcolor{darkgray}%
  {\textbf{--}}}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}[bg=lightgray]
\textbf{\Large Linux distribution ranking,
        26th August 2009}
\begin{center}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\node (tbl) {
\begin{tabularx}{.6\textwidth}{cXrcc}
\arrayrulecolor{purple}
\textbf{Rank} & \textbf{Distribution} &
  \textbf{Hits} & \\
1 & Ubuntu\rule{0pt}{2.5ex}  &  2114 & \down \\
\midrule
2 & Fedora & 1451 & \up \\
\midrule
3 & Mint & 1297 & \const \\
\midrule
4 & OpenSUSE & 1228 & \up \\
\midrule
5 & Debian & 910 & \down \\
\midrule
6 & Mandriva & 907 & \up \\
\midrule
7 & PCLinuxOS & 764 & \up \\
\midrule
8 & Puppy & 738 & \up \\
\midrule
9 & Sabayon & 671 & \up \\
\midrule
10 & Arch & 625 & \down \\[0.5ex]
\end{tabularx}};
\begin{pgfonlayer}{background}
\draw[rounded corners,top color=red,bottom color=black,
    draw=white] ($(tbl.north west)+(0.14,0)$)
    rectangle ($(tbl.north east)-(0.13,0.9)$);
\draw[rounded corners,top color=white,bottom color=black,
    middle color=red,draw=blue!20] ($(tbl.south west)
    +(0.12,0.5)$) rectangle ($(tbl.south east)-(0.12,0)$);
\draw[top color=blue!1,bottom color=blue!20,draw=white]
    ($(tbl.north east)-(0.13,0.6)$)
    rectangle ($(tbl.south west)+(0.13,0.2)$);
\end{pgfonlayer}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{center}
\small
Data by DistroWatch.com, spanning over the last 6 months,
hits per day.
\end{frame}
\end{document}

It’s just a draft, some lengths have been adjusted to fit in order to demonstrate using TikZ with tables in a quick way.

26. August 2009 by stefan
Categories: Uncategorized | 21 comments

Comments (21)

  1. Martin says August 26, 2009 at 9:31 pm

    Hi,

    very nice for use in presentations. especially the use of gradient colours fillings make it look like it jumped right of some financial magazine :-)

    Reply
  2. Maratonda says August 27, 2009 at 9:24 am

    This is a very interesting piece of code, well at least for me…

    Aside from the LaTeX code, I would have liked a little more color contrast between the background and the foreground.

    Also,the table header is red-to-black gradient, but the text being black as well makes it less readable.

    Regards :)

    Reply

  3. Pingback: Fancy Table with TikZ « Thai LaTeX and MATLAB

  4. Stefan Kottwitz says August 27, 2009 at 6:04 pm

    Hi Maratonda,

    Like you I’m not satisfied with contrast and color, but decided to finish the post without making more adjustments because that experiment was already sufficient for me. :-D
    For my own presentations I’m usually choosing more decent colors and I’m preferring sober beamer themes.

    Best regards,

    Stefan

    Reply
  5. Barbero says August 28, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    Tikz so hard…

    Reply

  6. Pingback: tableaux tikz « Olivier Lemaire’s Blog – Tribulations d’un ingénieur

  7. Olivier says March 8, 2010 at 11:29 pm

    I think that would be interesting to do a new environment out of it. What do you think ?
    Would you mind if I show the following example on my blog here: http://olivierlemaire.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/tableaux-tikz/?

    %% the new environment

    newsavebox{dataTableContent} % Box
    newenvironment{dataTable}[1] % new environment
    {%
    begin{lrbox}{dataTableContent}%
    begin{tabular}{#1}}%
    %
    {%
    end{tabular}
    end{lrbox}
    begin{tikzpicture}
    node [inner xsep=0pt] (tbl){usebox{dataTableContent}};
    begin{pgfonlayer}{background}
    % table
    draw[rounded corners=1pt,top color=gray!1,bottom color=gray!30,draw=black]
    (tbl.north east) rectangle (tbl.south west);
    % top line
    draw[rounded corners=1pt,top color=gray!10!black,bottom color=gray!50!black,draw=black]%
    ($(tbl.north west)$) rectangle ($(tbl.north east)-(0,1.5baselineskip)$);
    % bottom rule
    draw[rounded corners=0.25pt,fill=gray,draw=black]%
    (tbl.south west) rectangle ($(tbl.south east)+(0,0.05)$);
    end{pgfonlayer}
    end{tikzpicture}}
    %
    %

    %% Use of the environment

    begin{table}
    begin{center}
    begin{dataTable}%
    {@{hspace{2ex}} c @{hspace{6ex}} l @{hspace{6ex}} c @{hspace{2ex}}}%
    {scshapetextcolor{white}{Rank}}
    {Distribution}}
    {textsc{h.p.d.}}}\ midrule[0pt]
    1 & Ubuntu & 2231 \ midrule
    2 & Fedora & 1617 \ midrule
    3 & Mint & 1438 \ midrule
    4 & openSUSE & 1325 \ midrule
    5 & Mandriva & 1054 \ midrule
    6 & Debian & 978 \ midrule
    7 & Puppy & 792 \ midrule
    8 & Sabayon & 782 \ midrule
    9 & PCLinuxOS & 779 \ midrule
    10 & Arch & 729
    end{dataTable}
    end{center}
    caption{Source url{http://distrowatch.com/index.php}}
    end{table}

    Reply
  8. Stefan Kottwitz says March 11, 2010 at 8:10 pm

    Hi Olivier,

    that’s a good idea, thank you for this contribution!

    Stefan

    Reply

  9. Pingback: Pro PageranK » Archives du Blog » tableaux tikz

  10. Pingback: Schicke Tabellen mit TikZ « Uwes kleines Technikblog

  11. Stefan Kottwitz says April 29, 2010 at 9:36 pm

    Since I’ve noticed Uwes link, here’s another approach, using the tikz matrix feature. Though it’s a quick draft, I want to separate the formatting from the content, so the table in the document looks like

    \begin{matrixtable}{1.2cm}{2.4cm}{1.2cm}{0.6cm}{
   \head{Rank} & \head{Distribution} & \head{Hits} & \\
   1 & Ubuntu & 2114 & \down \\
   2 & Fedora & 1451 & \up   \\
             ...
  10 & Arch   &  625 & \down \\
}
\end{matrixtable}

    The output is:

    table with TikZ

    My definition of the table environment was

    \newenvironment{matrixtable}[4]{%
  \begin{tikzpicture}[matrix of nodes/.style={
    execute at begin cell=\node\bgroup\strut,
    execute at end cell=\egroup;}]
  \matrix (m) [matrix of nodes,top color=blue!20,
    bottom color=blue!80,draw=white,
    nodes={draw,top color=blue!10,bottom color=blue!35,
    draw,inner sep=2pt,minimum height=3.1ex},
    column sep=1ex,row sep=0.6ex,inner sep=2ex,
    rounded corners,column 1/.style={minimum width=#1},
    column 2/.style={minimum width=#2},
    column 3/.style={minimum width=#3},
    column 4/.style={minimum width=#4}]}%
{;\end{tikzpicture}}

    The benefit of the separate definition is that if you use several tables in a presentation and you would like to modify the appearance, you just need to change one definition to affect the whole document.
    The complete example code can be seen here.

    Stefan

    Reply
  12. Kevin Donnelly says June 22, 2010 at 10:34 am

    Hi Stefan
    The link to the example code doesn’t seem to be working – I just get the blog’s page-furniture. Is there an alternative location? Thanks.
    Kevin

    Reply
  13. Stefan Kottwitz says June 22, 2010 at 11:30 pm

    Hi Kevin,

    I’ve edited the link, hope you can see it now.

    Stefan

    Reply
  14. Flux says January 5, 2011 at 2:16 pm

    Hi!

    I love your example, thank you very much for this. I have one question however: I would like to use other colours like LightBlue (from the xcolors package), but this doesn’t work. Why?

    Reply
  15. pacomet says June 8, 2011 at 3:13 pm

    Hi

    A very nice and useful table. I still have a question. Is it possible to put a two lines heading.

    I’ve tried to use parbox inside the cell and that gives two lines but then text exceeds the size (height) of the heading line.

    pbox{3cm}{first line \ second line}

    Any idea? thanks

    Reply
  16. Stefan Kottwitz says June 8, 2011 at 7:34 pm

    You could raise the vertical size of the rectangles, I just chose values. For example:

    \textbf{Rank} & \parbox{3cm}{\bfseries
  first line \\ second line} &
  \textbf{Hits} & \\
...
\draw[rounded corners,top color=red,bottom color=black,
    draw=white] ($(tbl.north west)+(0.14,0)$)
    rectangle ($(tbl.north east)-(0.13,1.5)$);
...
\draw[top color=blue!1,bottom color=blue!20,draw=white]
    ($(tbl.north east)-(0.13,1)$)
    rectangle ($(tbl.south west)+(0.13,0.2)$);
...

    I raised 0.9 to 1.5 and 0.6 to 1.

    Stefan

    Reply

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  18. Manish says March 23, 2012 at 4:12 am

    How to change font size in above table?

    Reply
  19. Saki says April 17, 2012 at 9:32 am

    Hello,

    Is it possible to support multi-columns in the matrixtable environment?

    Thanks

    Reply
  20. Maria says September 25, 2012 at 5:40 pm

    Amazing, thank you for publishing this!

    Reply
  21. chico says November 28, 2012 at 4:30 pm

    Yes i am also interested in the multicolum question

    Reply

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