Using tikz to generate an abstract box in LaTeX

LaTeX is a document preparation system that I used for most texts I’ve written since my Master’s thesis, the largest project being my PhD thesis.

Recently a friend of mine asked me if I could help him creating a boxed abstract. Normally a \framebox{} would have done the trick, but he wanted the word “Abstract” in the top left corner of the box. I tried a few variations on his start, but in the end I realised I could try my newly developped tikz skills on it. Together with Google I came up with the following solution that loads the tikz package and then defines the \abstractbox{} command.

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  \usepackage{tikz}
  \usetikzlibrary{shapes,shadows}
  \tikzstyle{abstractbox} = [draw=black, fill=white, rectangle, 
  inner sep=10pt, style=rounded corners, drop shadow={fill=black,
  opacity=1}]
  \tikzstyle{abstracttitle} =[fill=white]
 
  \newcommand{\boxabstract}[2][fill=white]{
    \begin{center}
      \begin{tikzpicture}
        \node [abstractbox, #1] (box)
        {\begin{minipage}{0.80\linewidth}
%            \setlength{\parindent}{2mm}
            \footnotesize #2
          \end{minipage}};
        \node[abstracttitle, right=10pt] at (box.north west) {Abstract};
      \end{tikzpicture}
    \end{center}
  }

The resulting PDF looks like this:

Note that since the actual text is set in a minipage normal indentation is not set. This can be circumvented by uncommenting the line that sets the \parindent.