Books in linguistics frequently contain drawings such as vowel charts, syntax trees, or kinship graphs. The graphics language TikZ enables authors to input the code for vector graphics directly into the LaTeX version of their books. Vector graphics are generally visually more appealing than raster graphics in formats such as *png or *jpg, and TikZ already ships with standard LaTeX distributions. Thus, no further software installation is required on the author’s side.
In this blog post, we will draw a vowel chart to exemplify TikZ. In the first step, we will assume that there is a draft of the vowel chart, either drawn on paper or in another program. At the end of this blog post, we show two predefined vowel chart commands from the langscibook class that aim to make vowel chart generation from scratch convenient to the author.
