Installing TikZ and pgfplots

The ConTeXt distribution comes with MetaPost, a powerful graphical programming language, further extended by MetaFun. It also supports TikZ and Pgfplot as third-party modules, making it easy to include existing or new PGF figures in a document. This page briefly describes how to install the latter two to be used from ConTeXt.

Installing TikZ

The easiest way is probably to download the PGF GitHub repository: https://github.com/pgf-tikz/pgf and copy its content to your TEXMF directory (where your ConTeXt distribution is installed), then run mtxrun --generate.

Released versions (https://github.com/pgf-tikz/pgf/releases) can be installed similarly.

Installing Pgfplots

Pgfplots can be installed similarly from either the main branch of the pgfplots repository (https://github.com/pgf-tikz/pgfplots) or one of the official releases (https://github.com/pgf-tikz/pgfplots/releases/).

As of 17 July 2024, there were minor issues when using Pgfplots (main branch) from ConTeXt. Some of them may be resolved as follows:

• In the file tex/generic/pgfplots/pgfplotsmeshplothandler.code.tex, add the following after line 2806:

        \if0\pgfplotsretval
            \def\pgfplotsretval{5}
        \fi

• In the file tex/generic/pgfplots/sys/pgflibrarypgfplots.surfshading.pgfsys-luatex.def, delete \immediate on lines 64, 125, and 144.

• In the file tex/generic/pgfplots/sys/pgflibrarypgfplots.surfshading.pgfsys-pdftex.def, delete \immediate on lines 57 and 119.