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)

Writing descriptive diagrams

A descriptive diagram typically represents terms and explanations and connects or aligns them for illustration.

You know the standard LaTeX description environment. Let’s create a diagram in a similar layout to make it visually stunning.

First, we choose the fonts, a very large font for the items and a small font for each description, all in sans-serif font:

\smartdiagramset{description title font=\sffamily\LARGE,
  description font=\sffamily\footnotesize}

Now, we use the descriptive diagram type of smartdiagram and give a list of pairs of titles and descriptions, each pair in braces. Remember, since the comma is used to separate list items, we have to use additional braces if a description contains a comma itself. Also, end the list with a comma, since smartdiagram uses it to properly parse all items. We can come up with a code to describe PGF and TikZ:

\smartdiagram[descriptive diagram]{
  {PGF, {Portable Graphics...