How to draw an overlaid pages image for a Tikz flowchart node?

Question

In Natural Language Processing and related disciplines, it's common to see an "overlaid pages" image included as a node in a flowchart of a system:

  _____
 |  ___|__
 | |   ___|___
 | |  |       |
 | |  |       |
 |_|  |       |
   |__|       |
      |       |
      |_______|

The image is meant to represent a corpus or some other large collection of text data. How can I draw something like this for a Tikz flowchart?

Answer 1

You can use shadows library from tikz.

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

\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}
   \node [double copy shadow={shadow xshift=-1ex,shadow yshift=1.5ex},fill=white,draw=black,thick,minimum height = 2cm,minimum width=1cm] {};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

If you are using it in a flow chart, you may define a style via tikzset.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{shadows}
\tikzset{    
    overlaid/.style={double copy shadow={shadow xshift=-1ex,shadow yshift=1.5ex},fill=white,draw=black,thick,minimum height = 2cm,minimum width=1cm,text width = 2cm, align=center},
}

\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}
   \node [overlaid] {Some text goes here};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}