Absolute node positioning acts weirdly

[fkjogu]

I try to position nodes on an overlay by using this code

\begin{scope}[overlay]
  \node at(10,20) {a};
  \node at(20,20) {b};
\end{scope}

I'd expect, that those nodes are on the same heights. However, they are not. Drawing pathes works just fine. But as soon are present, this weird behavior can be seen.

[fkjogu]

This behavior happens only inside a box.

[Dirk Surmann]

Hallo fwmi,

please provide a minimal working example (MWE). This helps to reproduce the error.

Best regards Dirk

[fkjogu]

\documentclass{tikzposter}

\begin{document}
    \block{Something}{%
        \begin{scope}[overlay]
            \node at(10,10) {a};
            \node at(20,10) {b};
        \end{scope}
    }
\end{document}

[Rick Barnard]

The block body sits inside of a parbox. So the node positioning follows whatever rules are inherited by parbox. I'm having trouble figuring out if it's an issue of rewriting [x]spaceskip or something more subtle from the parbox spacing/positioning rules. If you replace the coordinates with (0,0) for each node you see that the positioning is off. I suspect it's something deep with the parbox positioning rules.

[Elena Botoeva]

In any case, tikz code should be used inside tikzpicture environment or tikz command. I would say that your code is not "syntactically correct".

[Pascal Richter]

Elena is right, you need to use \begin{tikzpicture} ... \end{tikzpicture}:

\documentclass{tikzposter}

\begin{document}
    \block{Something}{%
        \begin{tikzpicture}
            \node at(10,10) {a};
            \node at(20,10) {b};
       \end{tikzpicture}
    }
\end{document}

[fkjogu]

Yes sure, this works. But that is not what I want to achieve. I specifically don't want to draw inside a block, but want to draw anywhere on the document without causing a reflow of the content. Thus I specified an overlay scope.

Just move it out of a block seems not to be working, as you you can check yourself:

\documentclass{tikzposter}

\begin{document}
    \block{Something}{%
        Some content
    }

    \begin{tikzpicture}[overlay]
        \node at(0, 0) {a};
        \node at(2, 0) {b};
   \end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Having it inside a block makes the coordinates relative to that block.

How would I achieve that?

Also, I'm not sure about needing a tikzpicture environment, since the \block command itself just uses TIKZ commands.