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)

Shifting nodes and coordinates

We will start with shifting. This is another word for doing a translation, which means moving a coordinate or a node to another position in a straight line by a particular dimension or by another coordinate.

The following three options can be used for shifting:

  • xshift is a dimension for moving in the x-direction, adding this dimension to the x value of the coordinate.
  • yshift does the same but in the y-direction. Here, TikZ adds this dimension to the y value of the coordinate.
  • shift is a coordinate to be added; its x and y values will be added to the x and y values of the other coordinate. Here, no dimension is used. You can use dimensions, but you don’t have to. The coordinate must be given in curly braces.

The shifting value can be used as an option to a path, so it’s applied to every coordinate in the path. For example, the following command draws a line from (0,2) to (1,3):

\draw[yshift=2cm] (0,0) -- (1,1...