tikzexternalize does not update on OS X [closed]

Question

I believe this issue is on OS X only, as I could not reproduce it on Linux:

Using tikzexternalize, the pdf is not updated whenever I change the tex-file. Instead, I always get the following answer (from latexmk/pdflatex):

===== Image './figures/main-figure0' is up-to-date. ======

Even if I manually delete the pdf, the figure is not rebuilt. It does not even check for the source file once the final pdf is ready. I suppose this has something to do with time stamping on OS X, but have no real clue how to get this working.

Any thoughts/suggestions/debugging possibilities?

Best, jochen

Answer 1

This is quite a challenging task with the information at hand... my suggestion is that

1. you write \tracingmacros=2 \tracingcommands=2 before your tikzpicture (make sure it is a very simple picture and make sure that the minimal document contains just one picture)

2. send the log files to me by mail. You can find my address in the manual of pgfplots

I will see if I can find out what happens.

Answer 2

Ok, so after we exchanged some log files, the issue was clearly caused by an old PGF version shipping with MacTeX. After installing the recent package taken from TeXample, it works like a charm. Thanks for the support, Christian!