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)

Positioning pictures on the background of a page

A regular TikZ picture appears right where we put it in the document text. We can use a center environment for centering it and a figure environment to have a caption and a reference label and to let it float to a suitable place in the document for better page breaks.

We can even put a TikZ picture anywhere on a page without affecting the document text, placing it in the background. As we already know, we can use the overlay option so that it doesn’t block any space. The remember picture option from the previous section is even more important here: once you set this, TikZ stores picture positioning information in the .aux file. In the next compiler run, that information is read from the .aux file and used for final positioning. That’s the reason why we need to compile a second time to have the final positioning.

We can consider the page like a node with a rectangular shape, having precisely the page dimensions. TikZ...