A few asked questions about the book itself, with answers. Questions about LaTeX? Visit me at LaTeX.org.
Why are no bookmarks or table of contents hyperlinks in my PDF copy?
I noticed this with free PDF copies, which are the reviewer PDFs and freely downloaded copies for readers who purchased a print or kindle. I did not get an officially purchased PDF ebook yet. My final and approved PDF had bookmarks and hyperlinked table of content entries. I thought I can prepare a LaTeX document that adds bookmarks with the pdfpages packages, not sure yet if I can preserve the original hyperlinks within the book then. Have a look here later. For now, with a free PDF (added to the book or Kindle) I hope it doesn’t bother you too much.
Why is this book so expensive?
It depends on where you order it. For example, from Amazon Germany, I get it for 37 €, from Italy and Spain I get it currently for 34 €. In the US, it’s listed for $60 and more, possibly as it’s not shipped by Amazon directly (yet). At the publisher’s website PacktPub.com you can also get it for 34 € plus shipping.
The publisher decides the price (international shipping may add to it). Also, color printed pages don’t make it cheaper but look way better. Note, there are booksellers who request higher prices currently (June 2023) such as Thalia (87,99 €) and buecher.de (72,99 €), sadly.
With every book (paper or Kindle) you can get a PDF version for free here: https://download.packt.com/free-ebook/9781804618233
Lupino on Twitter: Why someone should pay $60 for a book when there is excellent and open documentation for that package, is beyond my imagination…
Some people still like traditional books. We don’t have to leave libraries, bookstores, and book gifts to MS Word users. 🙂 And this book offers an alternative way of explaining things compared to documentation.
Why do you write TikZ, and not TikZ?
I like fine typesetting, this includes consistent fonts and aligned baselines. I like the TikZ logo, I just don’t want to scatter single italic characters in upright text paragraphs; that’s my personal opinion. I think the same about writing LaTeX, the “jumping” letters are fine for an outstanding logo, I just don’t want to have letter misalignment all over my text. Still, I use the “camel case” style for LaTeX and TikZ to represent the unique logo without harming the beauty of the visual text experience. Again, it’s just my personal opinion.
Why is the website called TikZ.org?
It’s because the name was available. Nobody from the project or users registered it, so I did it to preserve it for TikZ content. I did the same earlier with TikZ.net and launched a gallery with user contributions, TikZ.fr for our French TikZ friends, and TikZ.de as a German TikZ blog, already in 2014.
The TikZ project website is now the Github repository at github.com/pgf-tikz/pgf, in the past it was sourceforge.net/projects/pgf.