TITLE: Using TikZ in papers
QUESTION [17 upvotes]: I've started using TikZ for a paper I'm writing and am worrying that a journal might not accept the paper with inline TikZ. I had to update my PGF installation for all the examples to work and I'm not even sure that my collaborator will have an updated version...
So here are the questions.
-Do people know if journals (math and physics) accept inline TikZ? 
-Is there a nice way to create a pdf figure from a tikzpicture ? Perhaps I could have a latex file for each figure and only one \begin{tikpicture} \end{tikzpicture} pair and somehow compile the result to get a pdf or eps containing just the figure (and not a whole page with a figure in it...)
Cheers,
Yossi.

REPLY [11 votes]: It is not exactly answering either of your two questions, but here is another work-around.  I had problems putting papers on the arxiv which used pgf/tikz because the version of pgf/tikz they used at the arxiv was not as up to date as my version.  The admin at the arxiv told me to do the following.  LaTeX your file with the option -recorder.  This will create a .fls file containing a list of all of the FiLeS used by LaTeX when typesetting your document.  Choose all of the files in the list containing "pgf" or "tikz" and move them into the directory containing your document.  You can then send that directory to your collaborator/the arxiv/the journal without worrying about how up to date their set up is. 
[Unfortunately, I then had the problem that the tikz graphics I produced required an enormous amount of working memory which was greater than the allocation on the arxiv server, so I resorted to using 'grab' on my mac to take a high resolution snap-shot of the graphic, which I then incorporated into the LaTeX file :-(.  However, I have used this including-all-the-files technique for subsequent uploads to the arxiv.]