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)

Spacing within and around nodes

We saw that rectangular node borders just fit nicely around the text. To understand how a circular node border fits around the node text: imagine a rectangle node for this text, and then the circle node border circumscribes that rectangle.

You can set a node option called inner sep to get more or less distance between the node text and border. To get more spacing around the border so the anchors are farther away, you can set an optional value called outer sep. It’s written in the following way:

\node[draw,rectangle,inner sep=1cm,outer sep=1cm] {n};

It is better to see it in a picture, so take a look with a default spacing node next to the n node:

Figure 3.10 – Spacing within and around a node

Figure 3.10 – Spacing within and around a node

We can set horizontal (x) and vertical (y) distance separately; they are called xsep and ysep. With example values of 1cm and 0.5cm, the code changes to the following:

\node[draw,rectangle, inner xsep=1cm,inner...