TikZ/PGFplots etx
2015-03-02 — 2026-05-06
Wherein TikZ Is Compiled to WebAssembly and Rendered in the Browser Without a LaTeX Installation, Its Portability Across Quarto, Obsidian, and Other Environments Is Examined, and Various GUI Frontends Are Noted.
The classic type-your-diagram-then-work-out-what-went-wrong option for plotting. If I am constructing a well-understood type of diagram (e.g. a PGM) then this is good. If I am doing something unusual, it can become tedious. However, ChatGPT is very good at writing TikZ, and that is what I usually use.
The main strength of TikZ compared to other text-to-diagram tools is that it has flexible ways of declaring layouts. Alternative tools prefer automatic layouts, which sounds like a good idea, but empirically, it has never actually been what I want when I’m trying to draw a diagram that uses spatial information to convey things.
The original flavour, pstricks/TikZ, is based on PostScript and has compatibility problems with modern toolchains. Modern projects seem to prefer the more compatible (less powerful?) PGF/TikZ.
latexdraw is a Java pstricks GUI. Might be good, but I couldn’t install it.
TikZiT looks like a reasonably good alternative GUI (HT Luis Riera Garcia for showing me this)
a super simple GUI editor for graphs and string diagrams. Its native file format is a subset of PGF/TikZ, which means TikZiT files can be included directly in papers typeset using LaTeX.
Agustinus Kristiadi, in The Last Mile of Creating Publication-Ready Plots, introduces texworld/tikZplotlib, a matplotlib backend.
The Overleaf tutorial, LaTeX Graphics using TikZ, is probably the best one.
I am currently rendering TikZ in quarto using an extension I wrote: danmackinlay/quarto\_tikz. There is also pandoc-ext/diagram, which has more features but is a bit broken on recent Quarto versions and has more opaque error messages. I prefer my own extension because I like simple things.
1 In the browser
drgrice1/tikzjax is TikZ compiled to WebAssembly, i.e. the browser execution engine for Fancy Code: it renders TikZ to SVG in the reader’s browser, with no pdflatex and no LaTeX install required of anyone. The price is a WASM bundle on the page, which is a few megabytes. One downstream consumer is artisticat1/obsidian-tikzjax, which wraps the engine as an Obsidian plugin — TikZ as a first-class block in the most popular markdown PKM app.
The implication is that TikZ is no longer a LaTeX-only diagram language. The same source compiles in Quarto via my quarto_tikz, in Obsidian via the plugin, and anywhere else that hosts the WASM engine. So my notes on this site turn out to be accidentally portable.1.
A quarto_tikz-shaped extension that targets tikzjax for HTML output instead of shelling out to pdflatex would trade a LaTeX install plus compile time for a WASM bundle on the page, so I vibe coded one. Let us see if it works.
2 Incoming
3 References
Footnotes
I think we are restricted to self-contained notes, i.e. not importing external
\input↩︎