The tikz-3dplot-circleofsphere Package: Drawing Circles of a Sphere with tikz-3dplot

Abstract

A circle of a sphere is a circle drawn on a spherical surface like, for instance, circles of latitude or longitude. Circles in arbitrary 3D positions can be drawn with TikZ [2] very easily using a transformed coordinate system provided by the tikz-3dplot package [1] (that is because TikZ can only draw circles on the xy-plane). However, automatically distinguishing the parts of the circle lying on the front and back sides of the sphere, e.g. by drawing a solid arc on the front side and a dashed one on the back side, is a somewhat tricky feat. The tikz-3dplot-circleofsphere package will perform that feat for you.

Examples

Example 1: Latitude-longitude grid	Example 2: Bunch of great circles

Package Documentation

Click here to read package documentation.

Installation

Download the tikz-3dplot-circleofsphere.sty file into your project folder and include the package with \usepackage{tikz-3dplot-circleofsphere}.

References

1. Jeff Hein. The tikz-3dplot package. http://mirror.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/contrib/tikz-3dplot/tikz-3dplot_documentation.pdf, 2012 Retrieved July 27, 2018.
2. Till Tantau. Tikz & pgf - manual for version 3.0.1a. http://mirror.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf, 2015. Retrieved July 27, 2018.