Tikz Introduction

The pgf drawing package for LaTeX provides facilities for drawing simple of complicated pictures within a LaTeX document. There are many options available within the package and in this post we consider some of the basics to get up and running.

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As with all LaTeX documents we need to select a document class and include some preamble material prior to the body of our document. A blank template for a document with a single tikz picture is shown here:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{tikzpicture}
...
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

The tikz picture has a coordinate system similar to that which you would expect where moving from left to right on the page corresponds to increasing the x value and bottom to top increases the y value. A line can be drawn between two points wit the \draw command:

\draw (0,0) -- (1,0);

To draw a line between multiple points these can be chained together in a single draw command:

\draw (0,0) -- (1,0) -- (1, 4);

The line style can be altered by adding various options in square brackets directly after the draw command. So to change to a dashed red line we would write the following code:

\draw[red,dashed] (0,0) -- (2,0);

A circle of a given radius can be draw using the \draw command and we specify the radius of the circle in round brackets:

\draw (0,0) circle (2.5cm);

This will draw a circle with radius of 2.5 cm. The circle could be changed into an ellipse and we would then need to specify the radius in two directions, an example of this:

\draw (0,0) ellipse (2cm and 3.5cm);

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.