LaTeX Graphics with TikZ: A practitioner's guide to drawing 2D and 3D images, diagrams, charts, and plots

by Stefan Kottwitz

Unleash the power of LaTeX to create professional text, articles, diagrams, and charts using TikZ and its wide range of features for stunning 2D and 3D effects Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook 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. This book is for LaTeX users, including students and academic authors, seeking to incorporate figures such as diagrams, plots, and graphics to their theses, articles, and books. If you’re familiar with LaTeX basics from beginner’s books or tutorials, you’ll be able to effortlessly explore the graphics topics in this book.

Genres: Computer Science

304 pages, Paperback

Published June 9, 2023

Reviews

[Arthur Ryman · Rating 3 out of 5]

TikZ produces great looking LaTeX mathematical diagrams but its syntax seems ad hoc and its latest manual is 1322 pages long. I was therefore pleased to see this recent guide. It did provide useful information about drawing trees, graphs, and charts. However, much of its content was devoted to drawing cartoonish diagrams which were not relevant to my mathematical needs. I would have appreciated more information about drawing geometrical diagrams and for a more theoretical understanding of TikZ syntax. It seems that the quickest way to produce a TikZ diagram is to look for something similar in one of the websites that contain galleries of examples, and then modify the closest one you find. This is known as the "monkey see, monkey do" method of programming. Still, I am glad that I read this book and I hope the author produces more books on mathematical illustration with TikZ.

[Kumud Altmayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is organized with several chapters starting with “how to use Latex Tikz” as an introduction. Then, it starts deep diving into creation of images, flow charts, and other types of images one may need for his/her documents.

The best part, I like, is about 3D graphics with Tikz. It can also plot curves and many more including having fun with Latex Graphics usage. The book walks him/her through by showing how to draw cute creatures and puzzles. Overall, I recommend the book for excellent graphics creation with Latex Tikz.

[Joe Michalak · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great overview of TikZ and the various LaTeX drawing packages based on it.

[Tao Li · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good introductory book to tikz