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)

Using plotting commands and options

We already encountered the most important command, which is \addplot. You may have noticed that when we used \addplot with options, the color of the plot was black. When we did not use options, it was blue.

The reason is that a so-called cycle list contains the color and marker style for plots. So, by default, the first plot in a drawing would be blue, the second would be red, and the third would be green color. We leave the details of this to the pgfplots manual so we understand how the coloring happens.

So, when we use \addplot[color=yellow, ...], the options provided will replace the default options.

The \addplot+ command, however, appends the given options to the default options. We won’t use it here, but it’s good to know for when you see it used online and when you want to use the pre-defined cycle list of blue, red, and green for the first three plots in a diagram.

For both commands, we have three variants:

    ...