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Category Latex
Tags latex

There’s a neat little trick of putting TikZ code in the place of list bullets in LaTeX. Together with TikZ’s overlay feature, I was able to make a small graphical flowchart out of of list items: You just put a small tikzpicture in the place of every bullet, defining some globally accessible node with the ‘remember picture’ option. This has to be done by defining a command for inserting the picture, like this:

\newcommand\fcInstr[1]{{'{%'}}
\begin{tikzpicture}[x=10pt, y=10pt, remember picture]%
\node[coordinate] (#1) at (1,0.5) {};
\draw (0,0) rectangle (2,1);%
\end{tikzpicture}%
}


Not that the node is named after the first parameter: every node needs to have a unique name.

You then write your list

\begin{itemize}
\item[\fcInstr{a}] Set $t_n$: time grid for global $[0,T]$
...


Lastly, you can add add another tikzpicture to your document in which the defined nodes are referenced. In my example, I want to draw arrows between the ‘bullet’ picture.

Alltogether, it comes out like this: flowchart.tex flowchart.pdf