# Problem when drawing an axis-aligned bounding box around a tilted rectangle.

I need to draw an axis-aligned bounding box containing a tilted rectangle for a report about physic engines.

My initial idea was to simply insert a rectangular node, apply a rotational transformation to it and then draw the bounding-box with the fit library of tikz. Unfortunately, this doesn't work.

I tinkered with the original idea and wrote the following code. The idea is that I insert four hidden nodes, corresponding to the corners of the rotated rectangle, and then I fit a box around them.

\begin{tikzpicture}

% Draw the rectangle
\coordinate (R) at (7,3);
\node[rectangle,rotate=-30,minimum height=3cm, minimum width=2cm,inner sep=0pt,draw=black] (rect) at (R) {};

% An invisible node at each corner of the rectangle
\begin{scope}[rotate around={-30:(R)}]
\path (R) node () {}
++(-1,-1.5) node (a) {}
++(2,0) node (b) {}
++(0,3) node (c) {}
++(-2,0) node (d) {};
\end{scope}

% Draw the bounding box
\node[fit=(a) (b) (c) (d),draw=green,dashed] {};

\end{tikzpicture}


This is an image of the current result:

Is there an easier way to do that?

Bonus question: How could I get rid of the spaces between the rectangle and its bounding box (it want them to be touching)?

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You can directly use the corner nodes of the rect node, instead of defining them yourself.

If you just say fit=(rect), the fit command would assume that you mean (rect.north), (rect.east), etc., which doesn't help in this case because you need (rect.north east), (rect.south east), etc., but it's good to know anyway.

To get the outer rectangle to touch the inner one, set inner sep=0pt for the outer rectangle:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{fit}

\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}

% Draw the rectangle
\coordinate (R) at (7,3);
\node[rotate=-30,minimum height=3cm, minimum width=2cm,draw=black] (rect) at (R) {};

% Draw the bounding box
\node[fit=(rect.north west) (rect.north east) (rect.south east) (rect.south west), draw=green,dashed,inner sep=0pt] {};

\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}


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Thank you a lot, that works perfectly! – megamoustache May 28 '11 at 14:05