Book Image

LaTeX Graphics with TikZ

By : Stefan Kottwitz
5 (3)
Book Image

LaTeX Graphics with TikZ

5 (3)
By: Stefan Kottwitz

Overview of this book

In this first-of-its-kind TikZ book, you’ll embark on a journey to discover the fascinating realm of TikZ—what it’s about, the philosophy behind it, and what sets it apart from other graphics libraries. From installation procedures to the intricacies of its syntax, this comprehensive guide will help you use TikZ to create flawless graphics to captivate your audience in theses, articles, or books. You’ll learn all the details starting with drawing nodes, edges, and arrows and arranging them with perfect alignment. As you explore advanced features, you’ll gain proficiency in using colors and transparency for filling and shading, and clipping image parts. You’ll learn to define TikZ styles and work with coordinate calculations and transformations. That’s not all! You’ll work with layers, overlays, absolute positioning, and adding special decorations and take it a step further using add-on packages for drawing diagrams, charts, and plots. By the end of this TikZ book, you’ll have mastered the finer details of image creation, enabling you to achieve visually stunning graphics with great precision.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Getting Started with TikZ

First, congratulations on using LaTeX! You have already chosen an excellent tool for writing, and now you are ready to add high-quality figures to your documents.

To work with this book, you should have a good understanding of LaTeX and know how to work with a LaTeX editor and compiler. If you are still learning about LaTeX, here are two recommended books:

  • The LaTeX Beginner’s Guide, Second Edition by Packt Publishing gives you a fast start; you can find more information about it at https://latexguide.org
  • The LaTeX Cookbook by Packt Publishing offers many ready-to-use examples for various document types. Look at the book’s website at https://latex-cookbook.net

This chapter shall be a quickstart. We will cover the following topics:

  • What is TikZ?
  • Alternative graphics packages
  • Benefits of TikZ
  • Installing TikZ
  • Working with TikZ documentation
  • Creating our first TikZ figure

We will briefly look...