crop a tikzpicture

Question

My purpose is to create a table of numbers in a fancy font. My approach is based on tikzpicture: I plan to first generate a bunch of images of the numbers I want and later insert them into a master document with \includegraphics

At this time my images have too much whitespace. This problem has come up before on tex.stackexchange, but I haven't been able to make the proposed solutions work in this case. Here is what I am getting:

This is based on a suggestion found here:

Creating Logo with Fancy Font

and this is the code:

\PassOptionsToPackage{svgnames,x11names}{xcolor}
\documentclass[tikz,margin=0pt]{standalone}
\begin{document}%
\fontfamily{pzc}\selectfont%
\begin{tikzpicture}%
\node[anchor=base, inner sep=0pt, outer sep=0pt, text=Brown4!30!DarkBlue,scale=50]{1};%
\end{tikzpicture}%
\end{document}%

I set the inner sep and outer sep  to 0pt, but that does not appear to be enough.

Suggestions welcome!

Answer 1

If I understood correctly, clipping seems to work:

\PassOptionsToPackage{svgnames,x11names}{xcolor}
\documentclass[tikz,margin=0pt]{standalone}
\begin{document}%
\fontfamily{pzc}\selectfont%
\begin{tikzpicture}%
\clip (-2.45,0) rectangle (3.75,10.25);
\node[anchor=base, inner sep=0pt, outer sep=0pt,text=Brown4!30!DarkBlue,scale=50]{1};%
\end{tikzpicture}%
\end{document}%

Answer 2

As noted by ignasi, the problem is with the font itself:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}%
\fboxsep=0pt
\fontfamily{pzc}\selectfont%
\fbox{1}
\end{document}%

Produces this:

Compare above with this:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}%
\fboxsep=0pt
%\fontfamily{pzc}\selectfont%
\fbox{1}
\end{document}%

There is always space on left and right of 1. This tells us that standalone is doing good job in cutting the borders and the space left empty is not the border actually.

Hence your best bet will be to use imagemagick. Now the question is making the process automatic. You have two ways: 1. do it from within the .tex file, and 2. use a batch (.bat for windows) file:

From within the .tex file

(Compile this with pdflatex --shell-escape filename.tex) :

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{1.tex}
  \PassOptionsToPackage{svgnames,x11names}{xcolor}
\documentclass[tikz,margin=0pt]{standalone}
\begin{document}%
\fontfamily{pzc}\selectfont%
\begin{tikzpicture}%
\node[anchor=base, inner sep=0pt, outer sep=0pt, text=Brown4!30!DarkBlue,scale=50]{1};%
\end{tikzpicture}%
\end{document}%
\end{filecontents*}
%%
%% Produce pdf file
\immediate\write18{pdflatex 1}
%%
%% get png file from pdf
\immediate\write18{convert -density 300 -alpha on 1.pdf 1.png}
%%
%% crop the png file
\immediate\write18{convert -trim  1.png 1-trimmed.png}
%
\begin{document}
  See the same folder as this file.
\end{document}

The batch file:

Save the following as a file mytrim.bat:

@ECHO ON
cls
REM ECHO.
REM convert pdf to png
CD /D %~dp0
SET Program="convert.exe"
REM convert pdf to png
for %%A in (.pdf) do %Program%  -density 300 -alpha on %%A %%~nA.png
mkdir pngs
REM convert png to trimmed png
for %%A in (.png) do %Program%  -trim %%A pngs/%%~nA-trimmed.png
REM delete temporary un-trimmed png files
del *.png
Pause

First produce all numbers in pdf form in a folder. Put mytrim.bat in the same folder and double click on it. A new folder named pngs will be created which would contain trimmed png files.