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)

Filling an area

We already used the fill option in previous chapters. Now, we will take a closer look at filling. Until now, we filled node shapes and simple geometric areas, for example, with \node[fill] and \draw[fill]. There are command aliases:

  • \fill is equivalent to \path[fill]; we use it for filling without drawing a border
  • \filldraw is equivalent to \path[draw,fill] and \draw[fill]; in this case, we will get a border

Both commands take options for colors, such as \fill[yellow] for yellow filling and
\filldraw[fill=yellow,draw=red] for a yellow-filled area with a red border.

If a path encloses an area, TikZ closes it by connecting the last coordinate with the first coordinate, and then it fills it. Of course, it’s good to close the path ourselves by ending with the same coordinate as the path start coordinate. We can do that with a short generic statement by adding -- cycle to the path code, which means connecting finally to the start point. We will...