TikZ Scripts (unmaintained)

This repo contains a few scripts I wrote for dealing with matlab2tikz generated tikz figure.

tikzsimplify

This functionality has now been merged into the cleanfigure function of matlab2tikz. You probably want to use that.

tikzsimplify [-h] [-t tol] [-v] [-i] [-o outfile.tex] infile.tex
optional arguments:
  -h, --help      show this help message and exit
  -t tol          tolerence of simplify algorithm (defaults to best guess)
  -v, --verbose   print info to stderr
  -i, --in-place  overwrite input file after simplification
  -o outfile.tex  output to outfile.tex rather than stdout

This is probably the most useful script here. If you give it a matlab2tikz generated .tex file, it will perform the Visvalingam–Whyatt algorithm to simplify the paths within. This should stop TeX running out of memory, greatly reduce the rendering time of the TikZ figure and reduce the size of the resultant PDF file.

The script will attempt to guess a good tolerance for the simplification algorithm by assuming your figure is around 15cm by 9 cm. If you intend to print the figure larger than this, you will need to specify a tolerance in the tol parameter. I recommend around (axis width)*(axis height)/(res * (target width in cm)*(target height in cm)) where res~=400-600 pix/cm^2.

By default, matlab2tikz limits the number of points in a plot in an attempt to stop TeX running out of memory. If a plot has more than the maxChunkLength parameter, which is 4000 by default, matlab2tikz splits into sub plots. This can cause artifacts for dashed lines but also prevents this simplify script from running optimally.

To prevent this, I recommend you export your figure with matlab2tikz(...,'maxChunkLength',Inf)

I highly recommend running this in PyPy 2.5 instead of the usual python interpreter as it gives about a 25x speed improvement.

pdf2pdf

Modified version of eps2eps. In most cases it will reduce the size of a PDF file.

Unix/Cygwin only. Requires ghostscript.

tikz2pdf

Generates a cropped and minimized PDF of a TikZ .tex figure. You may want to edit this script to import whatever packages you're using.

Unix/Cygwin only. Requires latex, ghostscript and pdfcrop.