LaTeX:Pictures
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This article will cover incorporating pictures and diagrams into LaTeX documents. If you're dealing strictly with geometric diagrams, consider reading about Asymptote, a graphics language that works extremely well with LaTeX.
Contents
How to Incorporate Pictures
Consult the Asymptote article for producing geometric diagrams within LaTeX. Otherwise, if you are using LaTeX to produce PDF documents, you can images such as geometric diagrams in your documents. The machine that we'll use to include images is the graphicx package.
To walk through this example, first download a sample image by clicking here to open the image, then saving it to your own computer. (Alternatively, depending on your browser, you may be able to right-click on the link to the image and choose "Save link as...") Save the image with the name 'myimage.png'. Make sure you pay attention to what folder you are saving the image to.
Next, open a new LaTeX source file in TeXnicCenter and input the following:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
\begin{document}
This is my first image.
\includegraphics{myimage.png}
That's a cool picture up above.
\end{document}
Save your source file in the same folder as you saved myimage.png. (Very important - if you save it in a different folder, you will get an error!)
Compile your source code and view the result. Make sure you have TeXnicCenter set up to produce PDF documents (LaTeX => PDF in the appropriate drop-menu). If you don't, you'll get a bunch of errors. If you followed all the steps correctly, you should get a file that looks a lot like what you'll see when you click here.
Let's take a closer look at how this code works. First, notice the new line
\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
This line includes the package graphicx, which contains all the image-handling routines you need to include images. To include a specific image, we use the statement:
\includegraphics{myimage.png}
Picture Manipulation
In this section we'll discuss how you can manipulate images in LaTeX.
Note that some of these commands work with text as well (see reflecting) - diagrams are not the only items that can be reflected, rotated, etc. In practice, the centering is the only one of the above you're likely to use much with text.
We'll start where we left off on the How To page. If you haven't already reviewed that page, do so now. Make sure you save the myimage.png file to your computer for use in these examples. Our original source code is:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
\begin{document}
This is my first image.
\includegraphics{myimage.png}
That's a cool picture up above.
\end{document}
Usually, we manipulate the image by adding an optional command to the \includegraphics statement. This optional command goes in brackets [...] between the \includegraphics command and the name of the image. For example,
\includegraphics[angle=45]{myimage.png}
will rotate the image 45 degrees.
