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Pgf

A Portable Graphic Format for TeX

From pgf-tikz·Updated June 25, 2026·View on GitHub·

PGF is a TeX macro package for generating graphics. It is platform- and format-independent and works together with the most important TeX backend drivers, including `pdftex` and `dvips`. It comes with a user-friendly syntax layer called Ti*k*Z. The project is written primarily in TeX, first published in 2019. It has gained significant community traction with 1,324 stars and 118 forks on GitHub. Key topics include: draw, graph, latex, pgf, tex.

Latest release: 3.1.11a
August 29, 2025View Changelog →

pgf – A Portable Graphic Format for TeX

Test suite

PGF is a TeX macro package for generating graphics. It is platform-
and format-independent and works together with the most important TeX
backend drivers, including pdftex and dvips. It comes with a
user-friendly syntax layer called TikZ.

See the directory doc/generic/pgf for more information. See the file
doc/generic/pgf/pgfmanual.pdf (also available from
https://pgf-tikz.github.io/pgf/pgfmanual.pdf) for a manual. This
documentation also explains the installation. See the file
doc/generic/pgf/license/LICENSE for license details.

Please go to the official repository at https://github.com/pgf-tikz/pgf or the
official mailing list at https://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/pgf-tikz to submit
bug reports, request new features, etc.

We also have a chat on the Matrix network at
#pgf-tikz:matrix.org.

Installation

In general you should just use the version of PGF that is shipped by
your TeX distribution. See their documentation on how to install
packages.

If you are feeling adventurous you can install the latest development
version in TeX Live from our tlcontrib repository.

console
$ tlmgr repository add https://pgf-tikz.github.io/pgf/tlnet pgf-development $ tlmgr pinning add pgf-development "*" $ tlmgr update --self --all $ tlmgr install pgf --reinstall

Development

Currently PGF only has a very rudimentary test suite to check for
regressions, so for now we check for bugs by building the manual for
each commit. To build the manual locally you can either copy the PGF
repository into your texmf tree (not recommended) or use the usertree
option of TeX Live. For the usertree option on GNU/Linux, follow
these steps:

console
$ git clone https://github.com/pgf-tikz/pgf $ tlmgr init-usertree --usertree pgf $ export TEXMFHOME=$(readlink -f pgf) $ cd pgf $ l3build doc -q -H

We recommend building at least the version for LuaTeX, as shown in the
example above because this has the broadest coverage of PGF features.
To test the animations feature you have to build the version for
dvisvgm.

Contributors

Showing top 12 contributors by commit count.

View all contributors on GitHub →

This article is auto-generated from pgf-tikz/pgf via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 6/25/2026