LaTeX Graphics with TikZ

Harness the power of LaTeX using TikZ and its wide range of features to create professional-looking text, articles, diagrams, and charts with 2D and 3D effects

Key Features

• Achieve native construction of images and diagrams in your LaTex thesis, articles, or books with better quality
• Packed with complete explanations and real-world use cases that you can apply on your own
• Different customizations and tweaks to get a deep understanding of the synergy of LaTeX and TikZ graphics

Book Description

LaTeX graphics with TikZ will help you get introduced to what TikZ is about, the philosophy behind it, how it's different from other graphics libraries, and how it's installed. This book will be the first of its kind, focusing on LaTeX graphics with TikZ. You will learn how TikZ is integrated into LaTeX and about its syntax in detail. Further, we will learn to draw nodes, define shapes, position, and arrange them to add text inside. We will further take you through line styles, edges, and arrows and how to use styles, different graphs, and trees.

Moving on, we will learn advanced features and how to apply and limit the effect of styles on parts of the drawing, group elements in paths, hide or clip parts of a picture, fit a part of a drawing into a shape, add special decorations using shading, fading on paths, etc. Further, we will learn how to use layers, overlays, and absolute positioning, calculate coordinate values, such as the middle between nodes or projection, freehand drawing, plot functions in 2D and 3D, and so on.

By the end of the book, you will have full control of image details, and graphics with perfect alignment that would look perfect in your thesis, article, or book you want to publish.

What you will learn

• Understand and add TikZ packages and libraries to your document and LaTeX syntax for TikZ image environments
• Draw nodes, define shapes, position them, arrange them, and add text inside
• Use trees, graphs, charts functions, and libraries and understand how to draw lines, edges, and arrows
• Apply special decorations using shading, fading, and filling features in TikZ
• Learn how to semi-automatically export TikZ images in separate standalone PDF files
• Draw block diagrams, flow charts, and create diagrams in standard layouts with predefined color and shape styles

Who This Book Is For

This book is for LaTeX users, such as students and academic authors, who want to add figures such as diagrams, plots, and graphics in general to their thesis, articles and books. After reading any LaTeX Beginner's book or tutorial, you can work with the graphics topics of this book.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing and installing TikZ
2. First steps creating TikZ images
3. Drawing and Positioning Nodes
4. Drawing edges, lines, and arrows
5. Using styles
6. Drawing trees, graphs, and charts
7. Filling, Clipping, and Shading
8. Adding decoration, shading, fading, and filling
9. Using overlays and absolute positioning
10. Doing calculations and transformations
11. Externalizing graphics
12. Freehand drawing
13. Plotting functions in 2d and 3d
14. Drawing diagrams in 2d and 3d
15. Having fun with TikZ
16. TikZ resources on the Internet