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)

Using the to operation

Remember, TikZ calls the instructions on a path an operation. Examples were the node and edge operations. What we draw with edge is not part of the main path. So, each edge can have its own appearance regarding styles or arrows, which makes it very flexible.

While the main focus of the current chapter is on the edge operation, there’s another similar and handy one: the to operation. You will see it in examples on the internet and in the documentation, so let’s also discuss it here, briefly at least.

The to operation can also be used to draw lines, curves, and arrows between nodes. to works with the current path options, such as color and arrow style. On the other hand, edge inherits the main path options but can take more path options in addition, such as its own color and arrow style. Suppose you don’t need that many different path options. In that case, you can stick with to, which still understands the connection-specific options...