Anton Stefanek

Various useful LaTeX things

My PGF/TikZ & pgfplots setup

The PGF and TikZ and pgfplots are currently my most favourite tools for producing diagrams for LaTeX documents. However, I have had two issues with using these packages:

  • the time it takes to generate some of the figures, especially from pgfplots, can be quite long
  • not everyone editing the documents can be willing to install and use the packages

    • The externalisation features of pgf can help with these to some extent. Here I describe how I include TikZ/pgfplots figures so that they don't have to be typeset every time a change is made somewhere else in the document and so that they can be included even when TikZ/pgfplots are not installed. I got some useful inspiration from here .