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)

Installing TikZ

As you already have LaTeX installed, you just need to ensure that the pgf and xcolor packages are installed. You can install them in three main ways, which are discussed in the following sub-sections.

With a vanilla TeX distribution

If you installed LaTeX from DVD or via the internet from an original TeX distribution, use its package manager to install the pgf and xcolor packages. These are the three principal TeX distributions, along with installation details:

  • TeX Live: Start TeX Live Manager (tlmgr or tlshell), then search and install the pgf and xcolor packages
  • MiKTeX: Use the MiKTeX package manager (mpm) to install pgf and xcolor
  • MacTeX: Use TeX Live Utility to install pgf and xcolor

When you want to update TikZ later on, run your regular TeX distribution updates, and pgf will be updated as well.

With an operating system TeX installation

If your LaTeX installation comes from your operating system repositories, which is usually...