Book Image

LaTeX Cookbook

By : Stefan Kottwitz
Book Image

LaTeX Cookbook

By: Stefan Kottwitz

Overview of this book

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting software and is very popular, especially among scientists. Its programming language gives you full control over every aspect of your documents, no matter how complex they are. LaTeX's huge amount of customizable templates and supporting packages cover most aspects of writing with embedded typographic expertise. With this book you will learn to leverage the capabilities of the latest document classes and explore the functionalities of the newest packages. The book starts with examples of common document types. It provides you with samples for tuning text design, using fonts, embedding images, and creating legible tables. Common document parts such as the bibliography, glossary, and index are covered, with LaTeX's modern approach.You will learn how to create excellent graphics directly within LaTeX, including diagrams and plots quickly and easily. Finally, you will discover how to use the new engines XeTeX and LuaTeX for advanced programming and calculating with LaTeX. The example-driven approach of this book is sure to increase your productivity.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
LaTeX Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Shaping an image like a circle


A circle shape is a neat option for portrait photos or for images arranged in a graph or a tree.

How to do it...

Like in the previous recipe, we will define a TikZ macro for this purpose. Let's take a look at the following steps:

  1. Load the tikz package:

    \usepackage{tikz}
  2. Define a macro so we can use it often:

    \newcommand{\roundpic}[4][]{
      \tikz\node [circle, minimum width = #2,
        path picture = {
          \node [#1] at (path picture bounding box.center) {
            \includegraphics[width=#3]{#4}};
        }] {};}
  3. Use the new macro within your document to include an image:

    \roundpic[xshift=-1cm,yshift=-2.6cm]{5.8cm}{9cm}{filename}
  4. Compile the document. When I used the photo of my dog, I got the following image:

How it works...

Refer to the previous recipe to understand the TikZ node construction with the path picture command. This time, we used a circle for the outer node, so our image got cropped in to a circular shape. We used four arguments. The first optional argument can...