Creating our first TikZ figure

Our first goal is to create a TikZ drawing that is the same as Figure 1.1, which we made in the classic LaTeX picture mode, to get a feeling of the TikZ basics.

To be able to use TikZ, you need to perform the following three steps:

1. Load the tikz package in your document preamble:

   \usepackage{tikz}

2. TikZ provides additional features with separate libraries. Here, we load the quotes library for adding annotations with an easy quoting syntax that we will use in the drawing:

   \usetikzlibrary{quotes}

3. Use a tikzpicture environment for the drawing. The first code snippet we saw in this chapter, for the picture environment, will look like this with TikZ:

   \begin{tikzpicture}

     \draw circle (0.5);

     \draw (-0.5,0) to ["text"] (0.5,0);

   \end{tikzpicture}

This results in the following output:

Figure 1.2 – Our first TikZ drawing

We draw a circle with a radius of 0.5 cm at the default...