Having Fun with TikZ

Congratulations on making it to the final chapter! You worked hard through this book and have become seasoned and proficient in TikZ. This chapter will reward you with entertaining drawings you can try, modify, and combine with your pictures. Mainly, it demonstrates how skilled TikZ users had fun programming add-on packages and sharing them with the TikZ community.

The final chapter of our journey explores the following topics:

• Drawing cute creatures
• Playing and crafting
• Drawing world flags

We will walk through examples to see how to use the packages and understand how to customize the drawings, while you can find the complete reference of all features in the package manuals.

Technical requirements

You can find the drawings with the entire source code at https://tikz.org/chapter-15. The GitHub link for downloading is https://github.com/PacktPublishing/LaTeX-graphics-with-TikZ/tree/main/15-fun.

This chapter will utilize the following packages: tikzducks, tikzlings, bearwear, scsnowman, tikzpingus, tikzpeople, jigsaw, tikzbricks, tikz-3dplot, and worldflags.

Remember, you must always load a package with \usepackage to be able to use it.

The package names speak for themselves, so buckle up; it will be a rollercoaster ride!

Drawing cute creatures

The internet is full of memes about animals and cartoon characters. They have found their way into TikZ as well. In addition, avatars of users from the TikZ community and their favorite animals have been immortalized through the TikZ code. Let’s see some examples.

Playing with rubber ducks

Ducks are well-known for internet memes. In the developer community, for example, rubber duck debugging is a famous software debugging technique where the programmer explains their code in front of a rubber duck in every detail. By explaining it and articulating details and reasons, programmers can identify issues or bugs they would not have noticed by staring at the code. The rubber duck toy is also here rather as a meme than the solution itself. You can use, for example, a teddy bear instead, whom you will meet in the next section.

Rubber ducks, as classic toys, are so playful and fun that they have become a popular collectible item. Companies offer rubber...

Playing and crafting

We can use TikZ for displaying or documenting games. Here are some example packages:

• The logicpuzzle package can print puzzles such as Sudoku and Minesweeper
• The JeuxCartes package can display playing cards, such as for Poker, Tarot, and Uno
• The rubikcube package provides commands and macros for typesetting Rubik’s cube configurations, rotation sequences, and move notation
• The havannah package prints diagrams of the board games Havannah and Hex

The internals of TikZ are often hidden within the package source code. Sometimes they are not really visible to the user because the packages provide their own syntax. Since we are learning TikZ, we pick two games where we use commands within TikZ; we will choose jigsaw puzzles and building with bricks, as you know from Lego.

Creating jigsaw puzzles

We all know jigsaw puzzles: a set of flat shapes are assembled until they form a picture such as a photo or drawing. The jigsaw package...

Drawing world flags

For use in LaTeX documents and particularly in TikZ drawings, Wilhelm Haager created the worldflags package, which contains the national flags of all independent nations. Where possible, he used TikZ to draw them with geometric constructions; otherwise, he converted Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files via Inkscape to TikZ.

The main command is as follows:

\worldflag[options]{country code}

Here, country code is the common two-letter code for the country, such as US for the United States or NZ for New Zealand. The manual provides the complete list.

These are some of the supported options:

• width and length stand for the dimensions of the flag. With length of zero, the default aspect ratio is used for calculating the final length
• framewidth is the line width of the frame
• framecolor sets the frame color
• emblem or noemblem enables or disables the drawing of an emblem on the flag

So, for example, we can write the following code:

...