# tikz/pgf

## a little bit of tikz/pgf

Sat, 2012-05-26 15:32

I've been working with tikz/pgf, a system for creating figures in LaTeX. I've been encouraged to do this partly as a result of my frustration with Inkscape, which is excellent in places, but crashes often and frequently fails to be able to do exactly the thing I need.

Today, I figured out the use of variables in tikz. Here is an example:

 \documentclass[12pt]{report} \usepackage{tikz} \begin{document} %%% this is the tikz code \begin{tikzpicture}[auto,scale=1] \def\n{10}; % the number of circles \def\wid{5}; % the width of the drawing \def\r{2.0}; % radius of each circle \foreach \j in {1,2,...,\n} { \foreach \i in {1,2,...,\n} { \pgfmathparse{1.0*\i/(\n)*360}\let\ang\pgfmathresult; \pgfmathparse{ 0.5*\wid*(\j)/(\n)*cos(\ang) }\let\xx\pgfmathresult; \pgfmathparse{ 0.5*\wid*(\j)/(\n)*sin(\ang) }\let\yy\pgfmathresult; \draw (\xx,\yy) circle (\r); } } \end{tikzpicture} %%% end of tikz code \end{document} 

This example shows the use of variables, nested for loops, and mathematical calculations.

Here is the output: