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)

Adding a legend

When we have several plots or datasets, it can help to identify each plot with a different color and a description. To do this, we can add a legend. Typically, this is a box within the plot area containing a symbol or color to identify each plot, along with their descriptions.

To the code of the previous example, we just need to add the following axis option:

legend entries = {$\frac{1}{5}x^3-x$, $(x^2-1)^2$}

This adds a box with a description of our plot:

Figure 13.9 – Plots with a legend

Figure 13.9 – Plots with a legend

To place the legend in the top left of the plot, add legend pos = north west to the axis options. Similarly, you can choose south west or south east, whereas north east is the default. If you don’t have any whitespace where the legend fits nicely, you can set legend pos = outer north east; then, the legend will be placed next to the top-right corner of the plot without overlapping. You can see this in Figure 14.13.

The legend...