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)

Manually creating a smooth curve through chosen points

Our first goal is to draw a curve through several points that look round at any point. We will draw it similarly to a given curve as a second goal.

In the LaTeX Cookbook by Packt Publishing, in Chapter 10, Advanced Mathematics, there is a function plot that looks like the following:

Figure 12.1 – A sample curve without coordinates or parameters

Figure 12.1 – A sample curve without coordinates or parameters

If you don’t own the book, you can see that plot with code online at https://latex-cookbook
.net/function-plot
.

We will try to recreate this curve in the following steps:

  1. We will identify the coordinates of a few points of the curve.
  2. We will draw curve segments through these points to make it look like the original.
  3. We will adjust each segment’s start and end angle, as well as bending or the looseness of the curve, compile, look, and repeat until it looks as desired.

In the first step, we can include the source...