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 plot intersections

In Chapter 10, Calculating with Coordinates and Paths, we calculated the intersection points of TikZ paths. Similarly, we can let pgfplots determine the intersections of plots. If you use the fillbetween library as we did in the previous section, pgfplots will automatically load the TikZ intersections library. Otherwise, you can load it yourself.

First, we need to give each plot path a name. Then, we can calculate the intersection points as we did in Chapter 10, highlighted here:

\begin{axis}[axis lines = center, axis equal,
    domain = -1.5:1]
  \addplot[name path=cubic]   {x^3/5 - x};
  \addplot[name path=quartic] {(x^2-1)^2};
  \fill[name intersections = {of=cubic and quartic,
   name=p}]
    (p-1) circle (2pt) node [above right] {$p_1$}
    (p-2) circle (2pt) node [left]        {$p_2...