Where to Start with the TikZ Tutorials on tikz.dev

Updated

Start with “Tutorial: A Picture for Karl’s Students.” It is the first beginner-paced tutorial in the online PGF/TikZ manual on tikz.dev, and it is designed to teach the basics of drawing with TikZ without requiring you to read the full thousand-page manual first. After that, work through the Petri-net tutorial, then use the “TikZ Design Principles” chapter and the coordinate/path sections as your follow-up reference.

Why start with the tutorials instead of the full manual

The manual itself says the wealth of TikZ options “is often daunting to beginners,” and that the documentation “comes with a number of slowly-paced tutorials that will teach you almost all you should know about TikZ without your having to read the rest.” That is the key point for a beginner: the tutorials are not a supplement to the manual — they are the intended entry path.

The manual also answers the basic “What is TikZ?” question directly: it defines TeX commands that draw graphics. Two examples given in the documentation:

\tikz \draw (0pt,0pt) -- (20pt,6pt);

draws a line, and

\tikz \fill[orange] (1ex,1ex) circle ...

draws a filled orange circle. Seeing these one-line examples is a useful sanity check that TikZ is a command-based drawing language, not a separate application.

The beginner tutorial sequence

The manual lists four tutorials. Read them in this order:

Order Tutorial What it is for
1 Tutorial: A Picture for Karl’s Students First steps: basic paths, coordinates, and simple pictures
2 Tutorial: A Petri-Net for Hagen Building a structured diagram with nodes and edges
3 Tutorial: Euclid’s Elements Geometry-style constructions
4 Tutorial: Diagrams as Simple Graphs Graph-style diagrams

For a beginner, tutorials 1 and 2 cover the core workflow: specify coordinates, draw paths, and place nodes and edges. Tutorials 3 and 4 extend that into specific diagram types and can be read when you need them.

Follow-up reading after the tutorials

Once the tutorials are done, the manual points to these sections as the natural next layer:

  • TikZ Design Principles — explains how TikZ is structured, which helps you predict where commands and options live.
  • Specifying Coordinates — the coordinate systems behind every path.
  • Path Specifications and Actions on Paths — how paths are described and what you can do to them (draw, fill, clip, and so on).
  • Arrows, Nodes and Edges — the elements used in almost every real diagram.

The manual’s quick links also surface frequently used commands — \node, \fill, \draw, \foreach, color, circle, arc, grid, rectangle, label, edge, anchor, clip — which are worth skimming as a vocabulary list while you work through the tutorials.

Practical way to use the site

  1. Open the tutorial page and type the example code into a LaTeX document, compiling with pdfLaTeX as the manual’s own examples do.
  2. Change one parameter at a time (a coordinate, a color, a line width) and recompile to see the effect.
  3. When a tutorial introduces a command you do not recognize, jump to its section via the quick links rather than reading sequentially.
  4. Treat the library chapters (shapes, arrows, circuits, trees, graphs) as a catalog to consult when a specific diagram type comes up, not as required reading.

Common sticking points

  • Trying to read the manual front to back. The documentation explicitly warns against needing to; the tutorials are the shortcut.
  • Skipping the coordinate section. Most early confusion comes from not knowing how positions are specified, so read “Specifying Coordinates” soon after tutorial 1.
  • Version confusion. The online manual is an unofficial HTML version of the PGF/TikZ documentation, updated 2026-10-09 for version 3.1.12, maintained by Dominik Peters and produced with the lwarp package; Till Tantau is the documentation editor. If your installed TeX distribution ships a different version, check command behavior against your local version when something does not compile as shown.