LaTeX Drawing Guide

Overview

Publication-quality figures are a critical component of scientific papers. While external tools like matplotlib or Inkscape can produce good results, drawing figures directly in LaTeX using TikZ and PGFPlots offers unique advantages: figures share the same fonts and styling as the document, scale perfectly at any resolution, and remain fully version-controllable as plain text.

This guide draws from the awesome-latex-drawing repository (2,000+ stars), which provides 30+ complete examples of LaTeX-drawn figures covering Bayesian networks, neural network architectures, function plots, tensor diagrams, and machine learning frameworks. The techniques here apply broadly to any discipline that needs diagrams, flowcharts, or data plots embedded in LaTeX documents.

Learning TikZ has a steep initial curve, but the investment pays off substantially for researchers who publish frequently. Once you build a library of reusable components, creating new figures becomes fast and consistent.

TikZ Fundamentals

Basic Setup

\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{arrows.meta, positioning, calc, shapes.geometric, fit}