Grouping objects and applying operation to the group

Question

Forgive me for my perhaps naive questions, I am beginning to discover Tikz potentials. To ease certain operations as moving objects or transforming them, I want to know if there is a mechanism in Tikz that I can group certain operations and give a name to this grouping and use that name in doing operations on the whole collection of objects that are grouped. My first guess was perhaps scope will do this. But could not see how I can refer collectively to the scoped operations and/or objects. The best analogy, for give me to mention it, is the grouping operation in Power Point. Thanks for your help. Artimess

Answer 1

You can apply transformations to a scope, like for example:

\begin{tikzpicture}
    \begin{scope}[rotate=45]
        \draw (-1,-1) rectangle (1,1);
        \draw (0,0) circle (1);
    \end{scope}
\end{tikzpicture}

Whatever parameters and operations you specify in the [...] at the beginning of the scope environment is applied to every command inside the scope.

Answer 2

TikZ 3.0 introduced a new concept called pic. It's possible to include complex drawing commands inside a pic and later use it as a whole. A little example with Caramdir's code:

\documentclass[tikz,border=2mm]{standalone}
\tikzset{
    mycomplexfigure/.pic = {
        \draw (-1,-1) rectangle (1,1);
        \draw (0,0) circle (1);
    }
}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\path  (1,3) pic{mycomplexfigure};
\path[red,rotate=45,transform shape]  (2,1) pic{mycomplexfigure};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Some more examples with .pic:

• Tikz pic parameter
• How do I draw a little red square to label my right triangle?
• How to create something like a function (procedure, macros, etc.) in TikZ?
• How can I draw a TikZ element multiple times against a shaded background?

Answer 3

tikzpicture envionments can be nested. They behave like scope environments and support optional arguments for parameters. For instance, \begin{tikzpicture}[scale=0.5, transform shape] ... \end{tikzpicture} could be used inside a parent tikzpicture environment.