Book Image

LaTeX Graphics with TikZ

By : Stefan Kottwitz
4.5 (4)
Book Image

LaTeX Graphics with TikZ

4.5 (4)
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)

Creating and using pics

In LaTeX, we can write macros containing code that can be used repeatedly. How about using TikZ picture code repeatedly in a drawing? We cannot simply put one tikzpicture environment into another one. These pictures and their elements would interfere with each other’s styles and settings.

To solve this, TikZ provides a syntax for creating small pictures that can be used as building blocks in a TikZ drawing. The feature name is pic; let’s also call these short pictures pics.

A pic is a TikZ drawing code sequence, defined in a similar way to setting a style. To get practical, we will define a smiley pic based on the code for our self-made smiley in Chapter 2, Creating the First TikZ Images. The basic syntax is as follows:

\tikzset{smiley/.pic={ ... drawing commands ... }}

Like .style, .pic is also an example of a key handler.

We take our code for Figure 2.11 and put this code into the \tikzset command in the following way:

\tikzset...