Clipping a drawing

Clipping means cutting pieces from a drawing or a path. In other words, it means restricting a picture to a specific area, called the clipping area or clipping path. The clipping area can be a rectangle, a circle, or an arbitrary path.

First, an easy example. Let’s cut the corners of the filled triangle from Figure 7.6. A circle like this will clip it:

Figure 7.9 – A circle for clipping a triangle

First, we define the clipping path:

\clip (0,0) circle (1.5);

Then, we proceed with our drawing:

\fill[orange] (90:2) -- (210:2) -- (330:2) -- cycle
              (90:1) -- (330:1) -- (210:1) -- cycle;

The result, as expected, is the following image:

Figure 7.10 – A clipped triangle

Similar to fill, we can use clip as a command and an option:

• \clip is equivalent to \path[clip]; we can use it to declare...