[Tex/LaTex] pgfplots figures in publications

pgfplots

Journals usually ask for the figures in a publication to be in some specific formats (e.g. eps, svg, tiff etc). Now that I have used pgfplots to make all the figures in my article, what is the best course of action to convert all of the figures to e.g. eps? Should I use some kind of an external tool to extract all the figures (gpdfx, inkscape etc) from the current article and the convert them to the correct format, and then use \includegraphics to include them again? A lot of tedious work, surely there is a better option?

Best Answer

Actually, thanks to percusse's comment, I researched the pgfplots' externalize library and found that adding these two lines

\usepgfplotslibrary{external}
\tikzexternalize

to my preamble did just what I wanted for no effort at all!

(Ryan's answer is also great, and thanks to him, but this is a better way.)

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] pgfplots significant figures

You can accomplish this by adjusting the style of whichever axis' tick labels you wish to adjust (xticklabel style, yticklabel style, or ticklabel style for both axes). Here I assume you wish to modify the y-axis tick labels.

The particular items of interest are

/pgf/number format/fixed zerofill (fixed format with trailing zeros shown) and
/pgf/number format/precision=1 (display one digit after the decimal separator).

Since these are both in the same "folder", we can save keystrokes by using .cd to switch into that folder.

Putting this all together, we have

yticklabel style={/pgf/number format/.cd,fixed zerofill,precision=1}

which can be added to the axis environment options.

Complete Code

\documentclass{memoir}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\pgfplotsset{compat=1.8}

\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
% horizontal axis
\begin{axis}[xmin=0,xmax=50,ymin=0.0,ymax=4.0,grid=both,minor tick num=4, 
    major tick length=0pt,
    minor tick length=0pt,
    %no markers,
    ylabel=Applied Force/N,
    xlabel=Length/cm,
    yticklabel style={/pgf/number format/.cd,fixed zerofill,precision=1},
    every major grid/.style={black,opacity=0.8},
]

 \addplot [black] coordinates  {
(0,0)
(8,0)
(38,3)};
 \end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}

Output

enter image description here

[Tex/LaTex] Tikz external files and pdf

You can process your tikzpictures as standalone documents and then include them as pictures. E.g., the file myplot.tex might contain

\documentclass[border=0.1cm]{standalone}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
  \begin{axis}[...]
  ...
  \end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Your main document then includes the generated pdfs:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\includegraphics{myplot.pdf}
\end{document}