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)

Clipping a drawing

Clipping means cutting pieces from a drawing or a path. In other words, it means restricting a picture to a specific area, called the clipping area or clipping path. The clipping area can be a rectangle, a circle, or an arbitrary path.

First, an easy example. Let’s cut the corners of the filled triangle from Figure 7.6. A circle like this will clip it:

Figure 7.9 – A circle for clipping a triangle

Figure 7.9 – A circle for clipping a triangle

First, we define the clipping path:

\clip (0,0) circle (1.5);

Then, we proceed with our drawing:

\fill[orange] (90:2) -- (210:2) -- (330:2) -- cycle
              (90:1) -- (330:1) -- (210:1) -- cycle;

The result, as expected, is the following image:

Figure 7.10 – A clipped triangle

Figure 7.10 – A clipped triangle

Similar to fill, we can use clip as a command and an option:

  • \clip is equivalent to \path[clip]; we can use it to declare...