Book Image

LaTeX Graphics with TikZ

By : Stefan Kottwitz
4.5 (4)
Book Image

LaTeX Graphics with TikZ

4.5 (4)
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)

Drawing world flags

For use in LaTeX documents and particularly in TikZ drawings, Wilhelm Haager created the worldflags package, which contains the national flags of all independent nations. Where possible, he used TikZ to draw them with geometric constructions; otherwise, he converted Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files via Inkscape to TikZ.

The main command is as follows:

\worldflag[options]{country code}

Here, country code is the common two-letter code for the country, such as US for the United States or NZ for New Zealand. The manual provides the complete list.

These are some of the supported options:

  • width and length stand for the dimensions of the flag. With length of zero, the default aspect ratio is used for calculating the final length
  • framewidth is the line width of the frame
  • framecolor sets the frame color
  • emblem or noemblem enables or disables the drawing of an emblem on the flag

So, for example, we can write the following code:

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