TikZ support: Getting coordinates from pdf viewer

[egidioln]

Hello!
Is there any way to get the values of x, y coordinates for TikZ (maybe with overlay and shift=(current page.center) options) from a click on the pdf viewer (as the "Go to Source" command does for code)? I think this would be very useful for drawing or placing nodes on slides with TikZ.

If not, I'd be willing to help implement something like this :)

[muzimuzhi]

I'm afraid that's impossible. In the output PDF, the tikz coordinate info is lost.

To ease the node positioning task, path operation grid (like \draw (0,0) grid (3,2);, see pgfmanual sec. 14.8) and relative node positioning (see pgfmanual sec. 17.5.2 and 17.5.3) may help.

[egidioln]

Thanks for your reply @muzimuzhi ! Indeed, I'm using grid for that now but some interactive method would be really helpful...

Would you know if there is at least a way to recover x, y position of a mouse click relative to the page corner (in cm, for instance)? This would help to draw in standalone documents (with \documentclass[tikz]{standalone}) and then move the final figure to the original document.

[muzimuzhi]

Sorry I don't know. Searching for "pdf reader, show mouse coordinate" shows Adobe Acrobat and some other readers (see https://stackoverflow.com/q/8971243) have this utility. Then the task becomes, how to config texstudio to work with outer pdf reader.

Also there's some indirect ways to draw grid with coordinate label ticks, see pgf-tikz/pgf#760.

[muzimuzhi]

In case it becomes an X-Y problem, I'd suggest to post on tex.stackexchange.com with an example of your real use case.

[egidioln]

Thank you for your suggestions :)
I'll try something like this