How can I create a pdf document exactly as big as my tikz picture?

Question

I often create pictures in tikz that I want to either send to someone, or include in an email. The problem with that is that there is a big white space around and and especially below my pictures.

To get around this, I usually print screen my figure and crop it to get the size I want. Another solution is to use beamer and then scaling to make the figure as big as the slide size. Those two solutions, though, are not all that good. What I would really like is a way to get the pdf file to be just as big as my picture, as if it was cropped from start.

Is there a package to do that?

Answer 1

TikZ can do that itself. Have a look at section 63 of the TikZ documentation: “Externalizing graphics.”

This describes how all TikZ graphics in a given document can be pre-processed to speed the actual processing of a document. This results in one PDF file per TikZ graphic.

This is the (shortened) example document:

% This is the file survey.tex
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphics}
\usepackage{tikz}
\pgfrealjobname{survey}
\begin{document}

In the following figure, we see a circle:
\beginpgfgraphicnamed{survey-f1}%  <<< Note that `%` here, otherwise a space will be inserted before the picture, refer to https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/7453/250119
  \begin{tikzpicture}
    \fill (0,0) circle (10pt);
  \end{tikzpicture}
\endpgfgraphicnamed

\end{document}

The following command produces the image file survey-f1.pdf from the above document, cropped to just the TikZ picture:

pdflatex --jobname=survey-f1 survey.tex

Answer 2

The package standalone does just that. It is a new package (released this year, I think) which will produce a document exactly as big as your figure (and you can use this for text or other things as well). Here is how you would set up your document

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz} 
%include other needed packages here   
\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}
% include your tikz code here
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}

If you do that, then you will be able to compile this directly to get a .pdf document exactly as big as the figure, which can then be included in emails, word documents, or even as a picture in another .tex document using the \includegraphics{} command.

The best thing about this is that it can also be included in a .tex document (e.g. article, beamer, etc.) as a .tex file using the \input{} command without having to change anything in the .tex document above. The main thing is to include the package standalone in your preamble (i.e. before \begin{document}) together with any packages you used in the above code, which in my example would be:

\usepackage{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}

and then where you want the picture to go put, for example:

\begin{figure}[!h]
\input{mytikzfig.tex}
\caption{  }
\end{figure}

where mytikzfig.tex is the .tex document with your tikz picture using the standalone package.

You can see this solution given in an answer to an StackOverflow question.

Answer 3

For a single TikZ picture, you can also use the preview package

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage[active,pdftex,tightpage]{preview}
\PreviewEnvironment[{[]}]{tikzpicture}

\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}[options]
...
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}

Answer 4

Make sure that there's nothing extra on the page (page numbers, for example, using \thispagestyle{empty}) and then use the command pdfcrop which is included in TeXLive. (It's a perl script).

That's what I used to make this picture for this answer on MathOverflow:

(source file: http://www.math.ntnu.no/~stacey/myicons/2n_graph_small.tex)

Answer 5

Since Konrad's answer didn't work for me and my version of pgf I took a look at the manual and came up with the following solution from the manual:

\documentclass{article}
%  main document, called main.tex
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{external}
\tikzexternalize[prefix=figures/] %  activate

\begin{document}
\tikzsetnextfilename{trees}
\begin{tikzpicture} %  will be written to ’figures/trees.pdf’
  \node {root}
    child {node {left}}
    child {node {right}};
\end{tikzpicture}

\begin{tikzpicture} %  will be written to ’figures/main-figure0.pdf’
   \draw[help lines] (0,0) grid (5,5);
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

The following command will generate the figures:

pdflatex -shell-escape main