8

My thesis currently has a few PSTricks and TikZ pictures. It takes a while to compile over here Scott says he has some scripts to automate externalising TikZ pictures.

I'm looking ideally for something that will automatically name sequentially all of my figures, generate the graphics for them and automagically include them. I don't mind if I have to delete them by hand to recompile them if I change the code.

For PSTricks and TikZ please =) cause currently LaTeX is spanned for each PSTricks picture to generate a PDF graphic, and TikZ compilations starts to take up time.

P.S. half way through hte thesis I discovered TikZ but don't have time to redo PSTricks graphics.

Community
  • 1
Dima
  • 12,427
  • 8
  • 40
  • 53

1 Answers1

5

If you have a recent version of tikz, there is a handy command that will do this for you.

If you go here: http://www.texample.net/tikz/builds/ you can download a up-to-date version of tikz. The documentation has instructions on how to implement the externalization in section 4.31 Externalization (in the current documentation this is page 340). The basic setup is explained in an example.

I use this for my own research and it is extremely easy. You can find a file I have implemented this in here more-ar-quivers.tex.

TheAxeR
  • 526
  • 4
  • 6
  • The specific reference to the documentation is useful, but this doesn't exactly automate the rest... – András Salamon Aug 05 '10 at 17:44
  • Do you mean not automating the pdftricks? Unfortunately I have never used pdftricks so I am not sure of any options for it. – TheAxeR Aug 06 '10 at 14:13
  • The question said: "I'm looking ideally for something that will automatically name sequentially all of my figures, generate the graphics for them and automagically include them". – András Salamon Aug 09 '10 at 13:06
  • I took that to mean that the resulting external graphics should be automatically named sequentially and for those graphics to automatically be included in the final output, no additional commands or editing required. The externalization library in tikz does exactly this, for the tikz graphics. It will not, however, deal with the pdftrikcs graphics. So if the differnt types of graphics are mixed throughout then the sequential naming will be messed up.

    At least in my experience it has worked this way. For each picture I get the file "jobname-figure#.pdf" which is automatically included.

     – TheAxeR Aug 09 '10 at 19:18