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?

For other and similar flowchart nodes, see “How can I draw a manual input and Multi-document nodes in a flowchart using TiKz?”, “TikZ picture shapes” and “Node shapes TikZ”. — Qrrbrbirlbel, Nov 01 '13 at 23:20
@Qrrbrbirlbell: Thanks for the links. Actually, the reason I didn't use the suggestion in the first link for "multi-documents" is that 1) the resulting image looks too much like MS Word's version of the image and 2) the overlaid image in the OP is the standard in the NLP literature. — Renklauf, Nov 01 '13 at 23:26

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 01 '13 at 23:07

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}

enter image description here

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}

enter image description here

This is great, Harish. Thanks for taking the time to share it. — Renklauf, Nov 01 '13 at 23:28

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

1 Answers1