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)

Putting images into nodes

We all know about fancy Visio and PowerPoint diagrams. In these, we have fancy node shapes, which are called icons or stencils, with many of them available.

While TikZ gives us a library of various shapes that we can customize, we can even use arbitrary images as nodes that we combine with a shape.

I’m working as a network engineer and producing complex network diagrams in my field of work. So, I will describe my approach.

Renowned hardware manufacturers, such as Cisco and Hewlett Packard often provide icon and stencil libraries for use with Visio, PowerPoint, Inkscape, or any drawing program. We can use the same in TikZ. So, we can go to a vendor download page, such as https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/brand-center/network-topology-icons.html. There we can find image collections in various formats, such as .vss for Visio, .pptx for PowerPoint, .jpg for general use, and .eps in Encapsulated PostScript format (EPS).

The best choice here...