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A small example:
\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\tikz{\node[text width=1cm]{\tt totot\\t t t};}
\tikz{\node{\parbox{1cm}{\tt totot\\t t t}};}
\end{document}
As you can see, alignment is not respected in the first TikZ node but is right in the \parbox. Is it a bug of TikZ? Why the difference?
For some reason I can't really well understand, in a \node the parameters \spaceskip and \xspaceskip are set to non zero values; when \spaceskip is non zero, TeX uses it for the interword space instead of the default stored in the current font information.
Try the following example
\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\tikz{\node[text width=3cm]{\ttfamily
totot\\
t t t\\
\the\spaceskip\ \the\xspaceskip\\
\spaceskip=0pt totot\\t t t};}
\end{document}
and see that setting \spaceskip=0pt cures the problem.
The option to set is text badly ragged (apparently TikZ doesn't like normal ragged right and adds to the LaTeX definition also the Plain TeX one when calling text ragged which is the default).
\documentclass[tikz]{standalone}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\node[text width=1cm,font=\ttfamily,text badly ragged]{totot\\t t t};
\node[font=\ttfamily] at (1.5,0){\parbox{1cm}{totot\\t t t}};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
If an option for deciding about the \spaceskip doesn't exist in TikZ, it should.
\spaceskip must be explicitly set, in order it changes value. Maybe you can suggest a TikZ style option to set it to zero, rather than using that awful trick of mine.
text justified sets \leftskip and \rightskip to 0pt and produces the desired effect. In general, the internal macro \tikz@text@action is executed just before the node contents and is where all the skip stuff is sorted out, so a new style could \def this macro.
Sep 11, 2013 at 11:05
\raggedright rather than LaTeX's.
In a parbox the text is justified and in a node with textwidth specified, the text is raggedright aligned. You can justify the text inside node.
\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{ragged2e}
\begin{document}
\tikz{\node[text width=1cm]{\justifying\tt totot\\t t t};}
\tikz{\node{\parbox{1cm}{\tt totot\\t t t}};}
\end{document}
Hence it is not a bug IMO.
Not related, but you can consider using \ttfamily instead of two letter \tt.
\begin{tikzpicture} \node[text width=1cm,font=\ttfamily]{t t t}; \node[font=\ttfamily] at (0,0.5) {t t t}; \end{tikzpicture}when you tell TikZ to respect line breaks viaalignortext widthinternally it switches from an\hboxto aminipageenvironment.