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)

Using Layers,
Overlays, and Transparency

Every TikZ picture is a sequence of drawing commands. As with LaTeX documents, TikZ drawings work linearly. Naturally, we can draw over existing graphic elements; they would overlap, and the most recent drawing action would come on top. We may want something other than overprinting, so we will look at a solution in this chapter.

Until now, we have been drawing on a single canvas. Did you know we can have multiple canvases stacked on each other, such as a background canvas, a regular canvas, and a foreground canvas? These are called layers of an image.

In this chapter, you will learn how to utilize layers. Furthermore, you will learn to use see-through paths, such as transparent areas, so that you can see what is behind them.

These are our main topics:

  • Using transparency
  • Drawing on background and foreground layers
  • Overlaying LaTeX content with TikZ drawings
  • Positioning pictures on the background of a page

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