Introduction

A picture is worth a thousand words. By presenting a single image, you can visualize a complex concept so that it becomes much easier to understand. Especially using diagrams, you can distill relevant information, and, for example, show relationships and processing orders or compare quantities.

This chapter mainly contains recipes for several kinds of diagram. We will start with simple diagrams and trees, then we will produce charts from data, finally we will build diagrams about concepts and events over time.

All the recipes in this chapter are based on pgf/TikZ, which is an enormously capable graphics package. PGF stands for Portable Graphics Format, which is the backend. TikZ is the frontend. The name is an abbreviation of TikZ ist kein Zeichenprogramm, which translates to "TikZ is not a drawing program". This recursive acronym, created in the tradition of GNU, should tell potential users what to expect: no WYSIWYG. This means that you cannot see the output during creation...