Diagrams

General-purpose packages for drawing diagrams

  • pgf and TikZ (Till Tantau 2005–21): a general TeX macro package for generating graphics, with a user-friendly syntax layer called TikZ.
  • XY-pic (Kristoffer Rose and Ross Moore 1991–2013; extremely powerful and versatile: there’s a chapter on this in The LaTeX Graphics Companion)

Diagrams for modal logicians

Commutative diagrams for  category theory

There is a useful Guide to commutative diagrams packages (J.S. Milne). But the headline recommendations are

  • diagrams.tex (Paul Taylor 1986–2019), classic macros: much used and usually highly rated — though not so much by Milne — for drawing simple or very complicated commutative diagrams for category theory.
  • tikz-cd (Florencio Neves, Augusto Stoffel 2012–21). This package facilitates the creation of commutative diagrams in TikZ by providing a convenient set of macros and reasonable default settings. This is what I use: but (a TikZ issue, I believe) a diagram-heavy document can be slow to generate a PDF.

Other resources

  • Tree drawing in LaTeX (from LaTeX for Linguists)
  • The semantics package supplies T-diagrams and other resources.
  • Dednat (Eduardo Ochs, 2019) processes proofs or diagrams written without markup, using LuaLaTeX.
  • The logix package (Michael Finney 2001-2022) provides knot symbols for constructing knot diagrams.

Updated 28 July 2021

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