Tikz externalization figure not aligned/caption missing

Question

I am putting a presentation together using beamer. I have a few tikz/pgf pictures that I externalize. Yet the figures are not put back into the document correctly. They are not in the right spot on the slides and the captions are missing. The externalization did produce the figures correctly as far as I can tell. I have the same problem when using the hyperref package in article class documents. As far as I know beamer uses hyperref in itself?

I am unsure how to circumvent this issue, any ideas?

Here's a simple working example

\documentclass[red]{beamer}
  \usepackage{tikz}
  \usepackage{pgfplots}
  \usepgfplotslibrary{external}
  \tikzexternalize
  \tikzset{external/system call={latex \tikzexternalcheckshellescape -halt-on-error -interaction=batchmode -jobname "\image" "\texsource"; dvips -o "\image".ps "\image".dvi}}
  \tikzset{external/force remake}
\begin{document}
  \frame{
    \begin{figure}
      \centering
      \tikzsetnextfilename{MyFig}
      \begin{tikzpicture}
        \begin{axis}[xmin=0,xmax=5,
           ymin=1,ymax=6,
                   domain=0:5]
      \addplot [red] {x*x-2*x+3};
        \end{axis}
      \end{tikzpicture}
      \label{fig:MyFig}
      \caption{This text is missing}
    \end{figure}
  }
\end{document}

I compile with, with TeXLive:

latex -interaction=nonstopmode -shell-escape %.tex; dvips -o %.ps %.dvi; ps2pdf %.ps

Answer 1

This is a driver incompatibility between geometry and tikz: geometry issues some \special paper size options before tikz can.

A work-around seems to be to add

\tikzifexternalizing{%
    \geometry{driver=none}
}{}%

to your preamble.

This tells geometry to avoid changing the paper size - but only if an external image is currently being generated.

An alternative is to use a different driver (pdflatex does not seem to be affected).

Answer 2

A workaround I have found, is to go the pdf2ps route within the externalization. I am quite lost as to why this works...

\documentclass[red]{beamer}
  \usepackage{tikz}
  \usepackage{pgfplots}
  \usepgfplotslibrary{external}
  \tikzexternalize
  %%\tikzset{external/system call={latex \tikzexternalcheckshellescape -halt-on-error -interaction=batchmode -jobname "\image" "\texsource"; dvips -o "\image".ps "\image".dvi}}
  \tikzset{external/system call={pdflatex \tikzexternalcheckshellescape -halt-on-error -interaction=batchmode -jobname "\image" "\texsource"; pdf2ps "\image".pdf "\image".ps}}
  \tikzset{external/force remake}
\begin{document}
  \frame{
    \begin{figure}
      \centering
      \tikzsetnextfilename{MyFig}
      \begin{tikzpicture}
        \begin{axis}[xmin=0,xmax=5,
           ymin=1,ymax=6,
           domain=0:5]
           \addplot [red] {x*x-2*x+3};
        \end{axis}
      \end{tikzpicture}
    \label{fig:MyFig}
    \caption{This text is missing}
  \end{figure}
}
\end{document}