Stripey balls in tikz

Question

I would like to insert a stripey ball in TikZ, i.e. a filled-in circle that looks like this one. Would you know a clever solution for doing that?

Answer 1

You can declare a pattern and then apply it to the circle. This is quite easy to do, but you need to know the PGF commands for generating graphics. See section 78 ”Patterns” in the manual (v2.10).

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{patterns}
\begin{document}

\pgfdeclarepatternformonly{stripes}
{\pgfpointorigin}{\pgfpoint{1cm}{1cm}}
{\pgfpoint{1cm}{1cm}}
{
    \pgfpathmoveto{\pgfpoint{0cm}{0cm}}
    \pgfpathlineto{\pgfpoint{1cm}{1cm}}
    \pgfpathlineto{\pgfpoint{1cm}{0.5cm}}
    \pgfpathlineto{\pgfpoint{0.5cm}{0cm}}
    \pgfpathclose%
    \pgfusepath{fill}
    \pgfpathmoveto{\pgfpoint{0cm}{0.5cm}}
    \pgfpathlineto{\pgfpoint{0cm}{1cm}}
    \pgfpathlineto{\pgfpoint{0.5cm}{1cm}}
    \pgfpathclose%
    \pgfusepath{fill}
}

\begin{tikzpicture}
    \filldraw[pattern=stripes, pattern color=black!60]
        (0,0) circle[radius=1cm];
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Every tile in the pattern looks like .

The unfortunate disadvantage of patterns is that they are not always rendered correctly. For example, there might be small white stripes where the boxes of the patters border. The picture above was taken with Adobe Acrobat at 125% zoom level. Evince renders it the following way (it seems to rasterize the pattern, hence the fuzziness):