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)

Building relationship diagrams

In Chapter 6, Drawing Trees and Graphs, we encountered a special relationship diagram, the mind map. The smartdiagram package offers other diagram types that indicate connections between concepts or objects. Such diagrams are naturally not linear – for example, a mind map can be very complex, such as in Figure 6.15.

Since they are focused and aesthetically pleasing, we will focus on circular relationship diagrams, which have a central concept and related concepts placed around them.

Our first diagram type shall be a bubble diagram. It’s like a mind map – there is a central concept or object, and related concepts are placed around it in a circular manner and shape. The following code illustrates it:

\smartdiagramset{bubble node font=\sffamily\LARGE,
  bubble center node font=\sffamily\Huge}
\smartdiagram[bubble diagram]{Diagrams,
    Nodes, Edges, Arrows, Labels, Colors}

This code generates...