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)

Adding labels and pins

We can add labels to nodes with a handy syntax that looks like this:

\node[label=direction:text] at (coordinate) {text};

Note that if we don’t specify a coordinate value, the node will be at the current position in the path. Paths begin at the origin (0,0) by default if no coordinate value is specified. Knowing this, we will omit the coordinate value in the following examples, so our nodes will be at (0,0).

Again, it’s good to see it in a picture. Let’s have a ball node with labels, where every label is scaled down by two.

For this, we will first have a brief look at the style syntax, as it’s already convenient here. Until now, we set the key=value pairs as options for nodes or other elements. To not repeat ourselves, we can set these options for all elements in a drawing by using a single option on the tikzpicture environment:

\begin{tikzpicture}[every node/.style={key=value}]

The dot is part of the syntax we thoroughly...