Pgfplot Automation tool

Question

Are there any good graphical software that I can use to draw diagrams/graphs and export them as pgfplot code?

For example, I want to create an histogram so I drag an histogram icon from a menu to the "scene" and tell the program to load the data from what file.. etc.

Answer 1

Matplotlib

If you use matplotlib there are at least two options for generating code that can be included in LaTeX files:

• The pgf backend: recent versions of matplotlib has a pgf backend, so you can simply do

  plt.savefig('filename.pgf')
  

  to generate a file with pgf code.

• matplotlib2tikz: a script written by Nico Schlömer that generates TikZ/pgfplots code which can be \input in your LaTeX file. See also below.

Matlab export

matlab2tikz (also available on the MathWorks FileExchange), also written by Nico Schlömer, works as matplotlib2tikz.

One can specify the width and height of the pgfplots plot, and the developer of matlab2tikz recommends defining these as macros, so that they can be changed from within the main LaTeX file.

This allows one to quickly create histograms rendered by pgfplots with consistent size.

Example

x = randn(10000,1);
hist(x)
matlab2tikz('testfig.tex')

This will generate a file testfig.tex in the current folder, that contains a tikzpicture with an axis environment.

To specify width and height, do for example

matlab2tikz('testfig.tex','width','\figw','height','\figh')

and have LaTeX code such as

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\pgfplotsset{compat=1.7}
\usepackage{kantlipsum} % for dummy text
\newlength\figw
\newlength\figh
\setlength\figw{7cm}
\setlength\figh{5cm}

\begin{document}
\kant[1]
\begin{figure}[hb]
  \centering
  \input{testfig}
  \caption{Quite normal}
\end{figure}
\end{document}

Answer 2

I use Octave. It has the print command with the -dtikz option which exports a plot to PGF/TikZ code.

More precisely, because Octave includes two graphics toolkits:

• When the Gnuplot toolkit is active, this saves TikZ code.
• When FLTK is active, this saves lower-level PGF code.

Also it requires some configuration, because the exported code does not work instantly. The pgfpicture environment has to be changed to tikzpicture, and the TikZ code invokes gnuplot which requires including a package from the Octave supplied texmf tree, and passing the --enable-write18 option to (pdf)latex.