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)

Benefits of TikZ

Compared to classic drawing programs where you click with the mouse on shapes and toolbars and drag and drop graphic elements, TikZ is very different. With TikZ, you program graphics with code.

That means your graphics will be the following:

  • Precise: You get the exact placement of graphic and text elements using anchors, baselines, alignment, relative positioning, and implicit coordinate calculations.
  • Consistent: TikZ blends in perfectly with LaTeX. You can use LaTeX fonts, symbols, formulas, colors, and macros within your drawing, and your drawing details will precisely match your LaTeX document design. That would be different if you imported some externally made images.
  • High-quality: TikZ generates scalable PDF images that look fine when you zoom in or out. There are no blurry or pixelated images.
  • Efficient: Similar figures mean similar code and similar styles; it’s all reusable, and when you adjust global styles, you change the appearance...