External Tikz pictures

2017/12/12

I produce almost all pictures in my math $\mathrm{\LaTeX}$ writing in TikZ. This is a nice library (and I’ve learned it over the years), which allows for-loops, effects, etc. The downside for me always was that compiling inline TikZ pictures takes a lot of time. For some months now, while writing a particularly figure-heavy paper, I wondered how I can optimize this.

Following this stackoverflow discussion, I have now adopted a great way of optimizing TikZ pictures by placing them into separate standalone tex files.

For example, this file

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
	%tikz code
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

can be fed into my usual latexmk

latexmk -pdf -pvc -f -silent -synctex=1 FILENAME

for automatic constant compilation, and the pdf result can be included into the main $\mathrm{\TeX}$ file using another thread of automatic latexmk compilation.

Note. For further possible optimization, $\mathrm{\TeX}$ class standalone can already produce png output, which (I think) cost less compile time to be included into the main $\mathrm{\TeX}$ file.

PS. I enjoy turning on latexmk to constantly recompile the $\mathrm{\LaTeX}$ sources for me. I think this might be the reason why my laptop battery just died…