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EnglishWhat Is tikz.dev and What Does It Offer?
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tikz.dev is an unofficial HTML version of the PGF/TikZ manual, maintained by Dominik Peters and produced with the lwarp package. It is not the official manual itself — the documentation is edited by Till Tantau, with contributions from other authors noted in the relevant parts and chapters. The page presents the manual for Version 3.1.12, updated 2026-10-09. Use it when you want to read or search the TikZ documentation in a browser rather than as a PDF.
What the site covers
The manual documents TikZ and the underlying pgf system, which together define TeX commands for drawing graphics directly in documents. The page's own examples show the basic idea:
\tikz \draw (0pt,0pt) -- (20pt,6pt);
draws a line, and
\tikz \fill[orange] (1ex,1ex) circle
starts a filled circle. The documentation notes that TikZ began as a small LaTeX style for graphics in Till Tantau's PhD thesis and has grown into a full graphics language with a manual of over a thousand pages.
The HTML version is organized into these main areas:
| Section | What you'll find |
|---|---|
| Tutorials | Four paced tutorials: a picture for Karl's students, a Petri net for Hagen, Euclid's Elements, and diagrams as simple graphs |
| Quick Links | Direct jumps to common commands such as \node, \fill, \draw, \foreach, color, circle, arc, grid, rectangle, label, edge, anchor, and clip |
| Design Principles | TikZ's design principles, coordinate specification, path specifications, and actions on paths |
| Core drawing | Arrows, nodes and edges, pics, graphs, matrices and alignment, trees, function plots, transparency, decorated paths, transformations, and animations |
| Libraries | Chapters for the three-dimensional drawing, angle, automata, calendar, circuit, decoration, fitting, matrix, mindmap, paper-folding, pattern, three-point perspective, Petri-net, shadings, shadows, shape, and spy libraries |
| Graph Drawing | Introduction, using graph drawing in TikZ, layouts (trees, layered, force-based, circular, phylogenetic), and data visualization |
| Utilities | Repeating things with \foreach |
Who it is for
The manual's introduction is explicit that TikZ's range of options "is often daunting to beginners," and that the tutorials are designed to teach almost everything you need without reading the rest. That makes the site a reasonable starting point if you are new: work through the tutorials first, then use the Quick Links and library chapters as reference.
If you need the authoritative source for citation or version-sensitive work, keep in mind that this is an unofficial HTML rendering — the content derives from the official manual, but the HTML presentation is maintained separately by Dominik Peters.