By Sertalp B. Cay | March 15, 2019
I absolutely adore LaTeX generated documents and personally use it pretty much for anything I can. Plotting graphs is one of my favorite thing to do. TikZ library makes it quite easy.
To plot a piecewise function, I happened to learn about \tikzmath which I have never used before.
Using it, you can define values and also perform math operations.
I used this approach to set values and plot the graph dynamically.
This approach saved me quite some to fine tune the graph in the long run.
Here’s the LaTeX code:
\begin{tikzpicture}
% Definitions
\tikzmath{
\r1 = 4;
\r2 = 3;
\r3 = 2;
\q1 = 5;
\q2 = 10;
\q3 = 20;
\x1 = \q1; \y1 = \r1*\q1;
\x2 = \q2; \y2 =\r2 * \q2;
\x3 = \q3; \y3 = \r3 * \q3;
}
% Axis
\begin{axis}[
axis x line=middle,
axis y line=middle,
ylabel=Total Price,
xlabel=Quantity,
xtick={0,\x1,\x2,\x3},
xticklabels={0,$q_1$, $q_2$, $q_3$,{ }},
xlabel near ticks,
ytick={0, \y1, \y2, \y3},
yticklabels={0,$p_1$, $p_2$, $p_3$},
ylabel near ticks,
xmax=\x3+5,
ymax=\y3+5,
xmin=0,
ymin=0
]
% Plots
\addplot[domain=0:\q1] {\r1*x};
\addplot[domain=\q1:\q2] {\r2*x};
\addplot[domain=\q2:\q3] {\r3*x};
\draw[dotted] (axis cs:\x1,\y1) -- (axis cs:\x1, 0);
\draw[dotted] (axis cs:\x2,\y2) -- (axis cs:\x2, 0);
\draw[dotted] (axis cs:\x3,\y3) -- (axis cs:\x3, 0);
\draw[dotted] (axis cs:\x1,\y1) -- (axis cs:0, \y1);
\draw[dotted] (axis cs:\x2,\y2) -- (axis cs:0, \y2);
\draw[dotted] (axis cs:\x3,\y3) -- (axis cs:0, \y3);
\addplot[only marks,mark=*] coordinates{(0,0)(\q1,\r2*\q1)(\q2,\r3*\q2)};
\addplot[fill=white,only marks,mark=*] coordinates{(\x1,\y1)(\x2,\y2)(\x3,\y3)};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}The first part tikzmath is for declaration.
When we start axis we first set properties (such as axis labels).
Finally, you can use pre-defined values inside pretty much anything: \addplot, \draw, coordinates, …
Here’s the final result:
To make this work, include \usetikzlibrary{math} in your code after imports.
See my .tex file at GitHub for a minimal working example.
Inspired by this answer at TeX StackExchange.
