mjhjmtu

I love LaTeX and TikZ for creating high-quality documents. The problem is that large projects require a pretty long compilation time and that complicated TikZ figures/plots quickly exceed the memory cap. I can evade his problem if I include different sections into my main.tex and consequently uncomment them if I am not working on them. An alternative approach is an externalization of my TikZ figures/plots, but that is also not optimal, because often I will have to uncomment plots in sequential order and then compile each plot in sequential order. But compiling the whole project will be quite problematic.

Question: That is why I want to know the best practice for managing large
projects with a massive amount of TikZ figures/plots.

If I understand you correctly, the reason why tikzexternalize is not working for you is because it gets confused and recompiles pictures when you change the order of figures by commenting out parts. The problem here seems to be that that tikzexternalize uses the relative position of a figure in the document to reference it.

One way to make tikzexternalize recognize pictures even if they change their position is to name them (then tikzexternalize will stop using the order to reference figures). Assuming you load your TikZ pictures from external files, you could do something like this:

newcommandinputtikz[1]%
 tikzsetnextfilename#1%
 input#1.tikz%

and then use inputtikzname of file wherever you want to put your figure. This will be stable when you move your figures around or comment out sections.

Of yource you can also manually name each figure with tikzsetnextfilenamename or define some other command/environment that does that, which is more suitable for your workflow.

What I would do in such a case is to redefine the environment of tikzpicture to be just a comment while working with the text or other part of my document and comment out this redefinition when the document is final or whenever I want to see it with all the figures inside.

I would also keep the old definition of it, in order to be able to work with individual tikzpictures in a environment called currenttikzpicture (this long name just for demonstration).

Code:

documentclassarticle 
usepackagetikz
usepackageverbatim
letoldtikzpicturetikzpicture
letoldendtikzpictureendtikzpicture
renewenvironmenttikzpicture[1]commentendcomment
newenvironmentcurrenttikzpicture[1]oldtikzpicture[#1]oldendtikzpicture

begindocument
begintikzpicture[scale=0.5]
foreach i in 1,2,...,4draw[-,thick,red] (i,0)to[in=i*10, out=170-i*10](2*i,4*i+1) to[in=170-i*10,out=270-i*10] (2*i-3,i/10)--(i,0);
endtikzpicture

begintikzpicture[scale=0.5]
foreach i in 1,2,...,4draw[-,thick,red] (i,0)to[in=i*10, out=170-i*10](2*i,4*i+1) to[in=170-i*10,out=270-i*10] (2*i-3,i/10)--(i,0);
endtikzpicture

begintikzpicture[scale=0.5]
foreach i in 1,2,...,4draw[-,thick,red] (i,0)to[in=i*10, out=170-i*10](2*i,4*i+1) to[in=170-i*10,out=270-i*10] (2*i-3,i/10)--(i,0);
endtikzpicture

begincurrenttikzpicture[scale=0.5]
foreach i in 1,2,...,4draw[-,thick,green] (i,0)to[in=i*10, out=170-i*10](2*i,4*i+1) to[in=170-i*10,out=270-i*10] (2*i-3,i/10)--(i,0);
endcurrenttikzpicture



Test
enddocument

PS: I know that the output would not keep the figures in the place that they should be, but I don't really care while trying to work faster.