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)

Creating flowcharts

If we want to illustrate a process or a workflow, we can create a flowchart. Such a diagram consists of nodes that represent, for example, process steps or decision points and arrows that indicate the process flow. We produced our first flowchart in Chapter 4, Drawing Edges and Arrows. Our result was Figure 4.6.

This section will look into a handy package that provides quick ways to create flowcharts and other diagrams easily. That package is called smartdiagram, and it truly deserves this name. Just look at how fast we can create a flowchart with just a few lines of code now.

First, we have to load the package:

\usepackage{smartdiagram}

It comes with a \smartdiagramset command that is used to customize the diagrams, and it works similarly to \tikzset and \pgfplotsset, except it is just for smart diagrams. For example, I strongly prefer sans-serif text in diagram nodes, so I can use the following command to get a sans-serif font in a diagram:

\smartdiagramset...