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I had not been aware of Tikz before joining this site, but am impressed with what it appears to be able to accomplish. Before I jump in and start learning all about it though, I wanted to see if people have any experience with submitting papers that use TikZ to scientific journals. Do they tend to automatically support it, or definitely not accept it, or work with you if you can convince them it's needed? Something else entirely? (I recognize that it would be possible to use TikZ in my copy of a paper, then generate a raster image from the output, and include that in place of the tikzpicture in the copy I submit, but that's not what I'm wondering about here.)

I'm personally interested in physics journals, but I think answers from any field could be potentially useful to others who may be wondering the same thing.

Seamus
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Michael Underwood
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4 Answers4

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If the journal doesn't support TikZ directly, you could create pdf images of your TikZ pictures. That's much better than providing raster images. pdf should be supported well and keeps the high quality. You still could provide the TikZ source with it.

Stefan Kottwitz
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    I created the standalone class/package to compile my TikZ (and TikZ-Timing) pictures to single PDFs. I also have a lot of them in my papers and this speeds up recompilations during the creation of the figure quite a bit. – Martin Scharrer Feb 12 '11 at 15:08
  • Is there any advantage of using PDF over SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) for adding standalone TikZ images? – Serge Stroobandt May 27 '13 at 21:01
  • @SergeStroobandt: PDF, or even moreso EPS (encapsulated PostScript, which is essentially the same as PDF) are much more widely supported by journals, at least in my experience. – Nick Matteo Mar 07 '14 at 19:43
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I know that arXiv support TikZ, though not necessarily the most recent versions. I imagine that you would run into the same problems with publishers, so Stefan's idea of creating PDF images seems best to me. In the TikZ manual, there is a section on Externalizing Graphics. It gives detailed instructions on how to do convert inline images to PDFs.

Bran the Blessed
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At least some parts of Elsevier support TiKZ.

András Salamon
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See the external library in TikZ/PGF 2.10, and the related question I just posted, Submitting a journal article as a single tex file.

The external library allows one to generate external PDF figures, and the bundled tikzexternal.sty allows one to get rid of the TikZ/PGF dependency, which journals probably don't want to deal with, without having to rewrite your article to handle the generated PDF files.

The Externalization Library is Section 32, pg 343, in the PGF 2.10 manual.

Community
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Faheem Mitha
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