[Tex/LaTex] TikZ to non-PDF

Question

How do I tell TikZ to output to a standalone image file? Like JPG, PNG, etc?

Yes, there is a way to output it to PDF, then do a snapshot. But this is for mathematical-visual comparisons, and I need precision trimming so that I can put the images side-by-side in a Word document.

Here's a sample using the standalone class. It only takes care of the length, but the width stays the same as the textwidth

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}

\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}
  \draw [step=0.5] (-1.4,-1.4) grid (1.4,1.4);
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}

I want the whole PDF to be trimmed to the edges of the tikzpicture. Or, even better, trim the PDF so that that I can leave (custom) margins around the graphic.

Answer 1

You have empty lines between the document and tikzpicture environment which puts the picture in an paragraph (which is \textwidth wide). Simply removing the lines fixes this:

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}

\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
  \draw [step=0.5] (-1.4,-1.4) grid (1.4,1.4);
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

The rest of your question is already answered in Compile a LaTeX document into a PNG image that's as short as possible.

In short:

pdflatex file
convert -density 300 file.pdf -quality 90 file.png

or with v1.0 of the standalone class:

\documentclass[convert={density=300,size=1080x800,outext=.png}]{standalone}

compile with:

pdflatex -shell-escape file

You might also want to use the new border option to set the border to 0pt.