LaTeX - Load table data for PGFPlots tikzpicture

Mar 30, 2017 LaTeX PDF

My main resource to create tikzpicture graphics in PDF files generated via LaTeX is the PGFPlots Gallery. But I guess there are more than 400 examples on this page. Here a minimal example for a PGFPlots function visualisation with data loaded from an dat file.

addplot coordinates

Here a complete tex document with a minimal example that uses inline coordinates and that can be compiled to an PDF file with the following command for example.

pdflatex example.tex

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\pgfplotsset{compat=1.11}

\begin{document}
    \begin{tikzpicture}
        \begin{axis}
            \addplot coordinates {
                (2, 4)
                (5, 1)
                (6, 5)
            };
        \end{axis}
    \end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Coordinates in external table dat file

We can put the coordinates into an file called coordinates.dat for example and replace the coordinates part with the table part in the document.

2 4
5 1
6 5

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\pgfplotsset{compat=1.11}

\begin{document}
    \begin{tikzpicture}
        \begin{axis}
            \addplot table {coordinates.dat};
        \end{axis}
    \end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

The result should still be the same.