Move a TikZ Node Below in Relative Positioning – How to Position TikZ Nodes

positioningtikz-pgf

I have the following code (stripped down from a much larger one).

(I understand that there are numerous questions (and answers including this excellent one) on relative positioning of nodes, but they do not seem to solve my problem. Before you mark my question as duplicate, please make it sure that it really addresses my issue ie. use relative positioning and not absolute positioning.)

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{automata,positioning}

\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}[node distance=40.0mm, auto]
  \node[state] (3) {3}; 
  \node[state] (1) [above left=of 3]  {1}; 
  \node[state] (2) [above right=of 3] {2}; 
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}

The output looks like this.

enter image description here

I would like to move node 3 somewhat below its current position. I have tried
many ways of doing this using relative positioning (and without using absolute
positioning), without success. How do I do this?

Best Answer

Just to sum up the above comments and get future readers an overview about the discussed answers:

Prerequisites:

\usetikzlibrary{positioning}

Per node distance definition:

\node (id) [below left=<x-value> and <y-value> of <reference>] {<text>};

Global distance definition:

\begin{tikzpicture}[node distance=<x-value> and <y-value>]
 \node (id) [below left=of <reference>] {<text>};
 % ...
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