LaTeX/TikZ (Academic Map)

TikZ is a graphics language inside LaTeX: a drawing is described by commands right in the source, and the compiler turns them into vector graphics while building the document. For academic work that is convenient because the map lives inside the text rather than as a separate picture: the fonts are the same as in the article, the sizes do not drift, and an edit takes a second.

The export is needed when a map goes into an article, a dissertation or a poster: the journal demands vector, the reviewer asks to change a caption, and the figure has to be built together with the text. The resulting .tex is edited by hand — line widths, colors, label positions.

The file is a self-contained document of the standalone class with a single tikz package. Layer colors are declared through \definecolor, the geometry is written out as drawing commands onto a 15 × 10 cm canvas, and a scale bar with a caption in meters or kilometers is drawn in the lower left corner. Object labels are added as \node elements, no more than two hundred of them, so the document stays compilable.

For Cyrillic, inputenc with UTF-8 and fontenc with the T2A encoding are included; the most reliable way is to build the file with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX — they work with Unicode directly.