Creating mind maps

We already know about trees for organizing information hierarchically, usually growing top-down or left-to-right, with several levels. Imagine a tree with a root in the center, and the first level of children is circular around it. Each child again is surrounded by children of the next level.

Such a diagram is called a mind map and is famous for visualizing ideas. We have a central concept, from which child concepts branch out in various directions. Each child concept can again have children.

TikZ provides the mindmap library, which can display a root concept as a circle in the center and child concepts as smaller circles around it, connected by branches, which are edges.

Load it with \usetikzlibrary{mindmap}. Then, add the mindmap option to the tikzpicture environment and build a tree with children, like in the previous section. Just the nodes will have the concept style. That includes a concept color value that you can set.

But let’s take small...