Avoid axes distortion when drawing on image in tikz

Question

I want to draw 10 circles in a circular shape, inside a rectangle.

The problem is that the 10 circles are positioned as an ellipse, and not around the circumference of a circle.

I want to place the 10 circles in a relative way to this rectangle; that's why I used the scope (maybe I will change in the future the rectangle size and the also the radius of the circle, also relative in size to the rectangle's dimensions).

So I used this answer, to create the following:

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{positioning,calc}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\node (frame) [
  anchor=south west,
  inner sep=0,outer sep=0pt,
  draw,very thick,
  minimum width = 4cm, minimum height = 1cm
] at (0,0) {};
\begin{scope}[x={(frame.south east)},y={(frame.north west)}]
\foreach \i in {1,2,...,10}
\filldraw ($ ({360/10*\i}:0.1) + (0.2,0.8) $) circle (1pt);
\end{scope}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

The problem is that the axes inside the scope are not orthogonal anymore; the unit vectors' are not equal in magnitude, as pointed out here.

But how can I fix it?

I added inner sep=0 and outer sep=0 but it doesn't seem to have any effect.

Don't set x and y (or xscale and yscale) to different values. Might I suggest pgfplots and [axis equal] instead. — John Kormylo, Dec 17 '22 at 21:48

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 17 '22 at 22:10

\documentclass[tikz, border=1cm]{standalone}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\newcommand{\rectw}{4}
\newcommand{\recth}{1}
\newcommand{\radi}{0.2}
\node[
draw, very thick,
minimum width=\rectw cm, minimum height=\recth cm,
] (frame) at (0,0) {};
\foreach \i in {1,2,...,10}
\fill ([shift={(-1,0.2)}]frame.center) +(360/10*\i:\radi) circle[radius=1pt];
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Avoid axes distortion when drawing on image in tikz

1 Answers1