Does anyone (not to specifically ask Christian) know if the prerequisite PGF/TikZ version listed in the PGFPlots manual is off by a bit? I've been trying to use \tikzset{external/mode=list and make} and then make -f <texfile>.makefile to generate my images externally. The images were not being created and I was getting an undefined control sequence error in the image log files.
The PGFPlots manual for version 1.7 that I have said it needs PGF 2.0. I had version 2.0 from June 2, 2010 installed at the time. I just upgraded to PGF 2.10 and then my process worked. I also did not see the section "Externalization Library" in the PGF 2.0 manual, but it does appear in the 2.1 manual.
EDIT: This is the code I had been testing with:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{external}
\tikzexternalize[prefix=figures/]
\begin{document}
\tikzset{external/mode=list and make}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\node{root}
child {node{left}}
child {node{right}
child {node{child}}
child {node{child}}
};
\end{tikzpicture}
A simiple image is \tikz \fill (0,0) circle(5pt);.
\end{document}
This code did not work with my 2010 version of PGF 2.0, but worked when I upgraded to PGF 2.1.
pgfplots. It is hard to tell without any information. Please first try and compile without the external library, if that works, have you then remembered to enablewrite18? If yes, we need to see some log-output. – zeroth Feb 25 at 18:21pgfplotsmanual is that there are a couple of places where version compatibilities are mentioned. However, one should typically have them updated simultaneously.pgfplotsgets updated more frequently, and as Christian is also a developer onpgfit is hard to guard against all cases. (However, in my previous version of the manual 1.6.1, it said that it required 2.10?, also in the CTAN manual, which is 1.7) – zeroth Feb 25 at 18:56