Including TikZ Pictures

In the following, I describe how I include TikZ pictures in my LaTeX documents. I decided to put every figure into a separate file, which I name e.g. "foo.tikz". The advantages of this approach are:

• One can compile the .tikz file on its own, i.e. editing and fiddling around with it until the figure is "done", without compiling the whole main document. (For this, I use tikz2pdf, as described below.)
• Every figure is managed in a separate file that can be put into CVS/SVN/.. and gets its own versioning history and backups.
• Reusing figures from one document within another is a matter of including the external file in multiple .tex documents.
• Externalization of graphics is simplified.

Actually, I do not only use \input to read the external files, but I am using the following code in the LaTeX document preamble:

\newif\iffinal % introduce a switch for draft vs. final document
%\finaltrue % use this to compile the final document

% [more preamble that in my case also uses \iffinal for other stuff]

\usepackage{tikz}
\pgfrealjobname{thesis} % <-- NOTE: this needs to be the real document's basename
                        %     (else you'll only get an empty output file)

\iffinal
  \newcommand{\inputTikZ}[1]{%
    \input{#1.tikz}%
  }
\else
  \newcommand{\inputTikZ}[1]{%
    \beginpgfgraphicnamed{#1-external}%
    \input{#1.tikz}%
    \endpgfgraphicnamed%
  }
\fi

Then, within the document I can just use the newly defined command to include the figure:

\begin{figure}
\begin{centering}
% like \input{...}, but adds caching via PGF's externalization feature:
\inputTikZ{Figures/house-example/house}
\end{centering}
\caption{\label{fig:house-example}An example drawing showing a house.}
\end{figure}

This means that I can use pdflatex --jobname foo-external thesis.tex (or Figures/house-example/house-external in the above example) to compile the included picture foo.tikz into foo-external.pdf, which is then automatically included for a faster compilation of thesis.tex. (See section "Externalizing Graphics" in the PGF/TikZ manual, i.e. section 60 at the time of writing.)

Here is an example foo.tikz file:

\begin{tikzpicture}[>=stealth]

\draw[->] (-4,0) -- (4.5,0);
\draw[->] (0,-1) -- (0,4.5);

\foreach \ang in {0,30,...,150}
  \foreach \scale in {1,2,4,8} {
    \draw[red,rotate=\ang,scale=\scale]
    (0.375,0) ellipse (0.125 and 0.0945);
  }

\end{tikzpicture}

As you can see, I added the tikzpicture environment within the .tikz file; one disadvantage of this approach is that one cannot easily scale the picture if it should have different sizes in different documents.

tikz2pdf

File: tikz2pdf

(4843 bytes; Fri, Jan/16/2009)

For a quick preview of changes I make to my figures, I wrote this little python script, which creates a temporary .tex file that includes the .tikz file and compiles that to create a .pdf file. Even better, it stays running and watches the .tikz file for changes; as soon as the file is changed in an editor, the .pdf is recreated.

Its main features currently are:

• Automatic recompilation of the .tizk file on changes. If you don't want that, use the --once commandline option.
• The template .tex file is dumped into ~/.tikz2pdf.tex; you may adapt it to your needs, e.g. adding \usetikzlibarary etc. from your main document's preamble.
• Using --view of -s (for "start viewer"), you will automatically get a viewer (kpdf hardcoded currently) fired up that displays the first successfully compiled PDF (and if your viewer watches the PDF file, the display will automatically update after every change to the .tikz file).
• The output from calling pdflatex is hidden (unless you use --verbose), but will be internally catched and output if pdflatex fails to allow you to see the error messages.
• At program exit, all (eh, see below) generated files are removed.

 

This page was last modified: Thursday, September 03, 2009