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)

Diving deeper into edge options

Every edge operation builds its own path; that’s why edge supports general path options. Furthermore, an edge can have connection-specific options, such as defining a straight line or a curve.

So, we can divide edge styling options into the following:

  • Path options, including general TikZ options
  • Connection options

Let’s look at them separately.

Path options

Remember, a path is a series of lines or curves with nodes and other elements. All options that you can set to a path, you can set to an edge, such as line style options.

These options can be as follows, using example values for clarity instead of syntax grammar formality:

  • color=red: This draws the edge in a red color
  • ultra thin, very thin, thin, semi thick, very thick, ultra thick: These options define the thickness of the edge line
  • line width=3pt: This denotes that the edge shall have a thickness of 3 pt
  • loosely dotted, dotted, densely...