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)

Calculating with coordinates

The calc library allows us basic operations with coordinates. Load it first in the document preamble with \usetikzlibrary{calc}, and you’re ready to go.

TikZ can now calculate what we write between $ symbols within a coordinate. While it may look like TeX inline math mode, it actually enables us to perform calculations and math operations.

Adding and subtracting coordinates

With just the simple notation of $(A)+(B)$ we can add two coordinates. How can this be useful? It’s an easy relative positioning when we use a particular coordinate and add a coordinate to have a shift in the x and y directions.

Let’s start with a coordinate, A, at some arbitrary position and build what we can see in Figure 10.5:

\coordinate (A) at (1,2);

Now, we can create a coordinate that’s just right of it, with an x distance of 1, by adding a coordinate with suitable values, x=1 and y=0:

\coordinate (B) at ($(A)+(1,0)$);

Note that...