Tikzpicture preview

[tecosaur]

Hi All,

I had an idea earlier for previewing tikzpicturs — #1427 (comment) and I'm pleased to say I've actually made some progress towards it — tecosaur/LaTeX-Workshop/tikzpicture-codelense.

I'm not actually too far off, this is the current state of affairs

• Locate tikzpictures
• Create codelense
• create standalone file
• compile
• preview
• identify important tikz lines in file and include
• keep track of same tikzpicture and same standalone file
• recompile after typing in tikzpicture
• precompile preamble for faster compilation

Looking for general feedback / ideas on this.

[tecosaur]

Update: No change yet, will do a bit more work on this soon. I've had some ideas about how to keep track of the same tikzpicture environment.

[tecosaur]

Currently looking for tikz 'bits' that should be pulled out of the main document for generating the preview. Stuff like tikzset. Any suggestions very welcome.

[tecosaur]

Update: Progress is being made! More details to come later. Shouldn't be too long before I start a PR.

[david-waterworth]

Nice work, it would be awesome if this worked for standalone tikz files referenced via \input , perhaps with a magic to point to a template file similar to how ktikz works (i.e. ktikz_template.pgs sets up the preamble/preview environment for a standalone tikz file).

I normally put my tikz files in a comon figures folder and input them into the document - the tikz files themselves aren't standalone since the document preamble sets up colours etc).

[david-waterworth]

Currently looking for tikz 'bits' that should be pulled out of the main document for generating the preview. Stuff like tikzset. Any suggestions very welcome.

I have the following preamble required to support tikz. Not sure how you'd detect the colour references though? As I mentioned above, as an option perhaps a magic to a template could be used with a default?

\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{arrows,shapes,positioning,shadows,trees}
\definecolor{blue}{HTML}{0081FF}
\definecolor{grey}{HTML}{B0B0B0}

\usepackage{pgfplots}
\pgfplotsset{compat=1.12} 
\usepgfplotslibrary{fillbetween}

[tecosaur]

Thanks for the example preamble. I can try expanding the regex to get all those important bits. Here's a demo

https://regex101.com/r/QcMKoe/1

If you have any other samples, I'd appriciate them 😃

Re: \includes — that sounds like a good idea, but I think we'd need some way of identifying that they are just tikzpictures, and not something else.

[david-waterworth]

I'm only just starting to use tikz, as I come across other stuff I'll upload.

Although it'll be quite difficult to get everything from the preamble that might be used in a fragment since you can put equations for example which might depend on a define from the preamble.

You may need to take the entire preamble?

[tecosaur]

That's why my implementation has the setting latex-workshop.tikzpreview.preambleContents which is a path to a file, the contents of which are inserted into the preamble used.

[david-waterworth]

Excellent, so it should work the same as gtikz / ktitz whihc is nice!

[tecosaur]

ktikz looks like a decent comparison to what I want this to end up being as capable as. In my opinion the "tikz commands" part of my Snippets Pannel PR should also help make creating tikz figures easier.

[FMuro]

Now that LaTeX Utilities is unmaintained, would it be possible to recover TiZK previews in LaTeX Workshop? I think that this particular functionality should have never left, since TiKZ is more popular everyday.

[tamuratak]

No.