How do I align content in a grid with CeTZ?

Questions
,
1

I have been using CeTZ besides Fletcher for some time now, but there are just a few small hiccups with the integration of these two packages. I have reflected that the only real reason I have been using Fletcher is because it provides a very nice system of vertical alignment, with its ‘flexible grid’. Would it be possible to emulate a similar sort of system with purely CeTZ?

As below, the size of each column adjusts to fit the content.

image
image1992×615 61.5 KB

I have attempted to use a grid to manually accomplish this sort of thing, however, the inflexibility is a serious hindrance in comparison to Fletcher.

Functionality that is not required:

  • Drawing edges between ‘nodes’/’cells’, I am fine with having each cell sit isolated from each other in this way
  • Debug utilities like Fletcher
  • Dynamically creating ‘rows’ of content (I am happy to have to pre-define this).
  • Some ‘beautiful’ syntax; I am happy with however verbose this happens to be

I was hoping there would be some simple CeTZ-native way to accomplish this, but after reading through the docs it does not seem like there is.

Thanks

2

For your example picture, you could use anchors to achieve this in CeTZ. Although I don’t think this scales well for arbitrary grids, since it requires all cells to be adjacent in some way.

#import "@preview/cetz:0.4.0"

#cetz.canvas({
  import cetz.draw: *
  set-style(content: (frame: "rect", stroke: black, fill: white, padding: .1))
  content((0, 0), [Some Large Middle Content], name: "root")
  content("root.north-west", [a], anchor: "south-east")
  content("root.north", [b], anchor: "south")
  content("root.north-east", [c], anchor: "south-west")
})

forum_5146_cetz-columns
forum_5146_cetz-columns718×202 35.8 KB

Also, is there a specific reason why you posted this in the General category? I think this post fits better in the Questions category with a title such as “How do I align content in a grid with CeTZ”?

3

Thanks Jane,

Yes sorry, this should in fact have been a question my mistake.

Just a follow-up, do you know whether it would be possible to implement some function or system that could automatically handle anchor positioning given some constraints? I have not seen such a use case online (of course, considering that in most cases people would opt for the Fletcher library).