Alternative TikZ drivers for tex4ht

This repository contains two alternative TikZ drivers for tex4ht which tries to fix some issues with the default driver distributed with TikZ. Among these issues are:

• wrong text formatting after TikZ pictures
• issues with text encoding
• compilation errors

pgfsys-dvisvgm4ht.def

The first driver one uses dvisvgm for the SVG file creation, resulting in higher quality graphics. The extra step with dvisvgm invocation can result in longer compilation time, but the result looks usually better than with the default driver.

This driver is a preferred option, as the resulting SVG files usually look identical to the produced PDF.

If you have lot of figures in your document, their compilation by Dvisvgm can take lot of time. You can speed it up using the dvisvgm_hashes extension for make4ht:

make4ht -f html5+dvisvgm_hashes filename.tex

It compiles only changed figures on subsequent compilation runs.

The driver has two modes. The default one supports complex images, but it has some issues with patterns. To fix that, you can try the tikz+ option. This option supports patterns and it should produce the same result in most cases, but it can fail with more complex pictures.

pgfsys-tex4ht-updated.def

The second available driver is a modified version of the original tex4ht driver. It doesn't rely on external tools for the conversion, so the compilation can be faster. The downside is that the resulting SVG file can look quite different from expected.

Note that if you use complex text nodes, like math contents, better results can be obtained using escape=true option. This option can be set globally in the custom configuration file:

\Preamble{xhtml}
\tikzset{every node/.style={/pgf/tex4ht node/escape=true}}
\begin{document}
\EndPreamble

It can even support MathML output in SVG. This SVG output is unfortunately supported only by Firefox.

Usage

Put following lines to your document preamble, before lines where the TikZ package is loaded:

\ifdefined\HCode
  \def\pgfsysdriver{<drivername>}
\fi 

The pgfsys-dvisvgm4ht.def is used by default, so you don't need to load it this way.

For example document that use the tex4ht-updated driver should use the following structure:

\documentclass{article}
\ifdefined\HCode
  \def\pgfsysdriver{pgfsys-tex4ht-updated.def}
\fi 
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
...
\end{document}

Installation

Clone this repository to a tex/generic sub directory in your local TEXMFHOME tree. For example:

 ~/texmf/tex/generic/dvisvgm4ht/

Read more about TEXMFHOME.