Generating JPGs and PNGs from Tikz/PGF

Gem of a post found at Nabble.com:

Re: Generating PNG or JPG ?

by Kjell Magne Fauske Mar 23, 2007; 02:47am

On 3/22/07, Hari Sundar wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is it possible to generate images from tikz code ? I would like to put these
> images on a webpage and was wondering if there is an automatic way of
> generating the images rather than taking screenshots.
>

Sure, I do it every time I update the gallery I maintain at
http://www.fauskes.net/pgftikzexamples/

My approach is to use Ghostscript. Lets say I have a tex file named
figure.tex The work flow is approximately like this:

> pdflatex figure.tex

I then run ghostscript on the generated file figure.pdf to generate a PNG:

> gs -dNOPAUSE -r400 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -sDEVICE=png16m -sOutputFile=figure.png -dBATCH figure.pdf

(On Windows the command is gswin32c. )

>From the resulting PNG file I generate a jpg thumbnail.

To crop the figures I use a package called preview[1]. The package
provides several ways of previewing parts of your document. For
example, adding this to your document preamble:

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

will extract every tikzpicture environment. If you use pdflatex, every
tikzpicture will be put on a separate page in the resulting pdf
document. To add a margin around the figure add:

\setlength\PreviewBorder{10pt}%

[1] http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/preview.html


Regards,
Kjell Magne Fauske