A trick to reduce the memory usage of LaTeX (instead or in addition to increase LaTeX’s memory as shown in my previous post) and to reduce build times for large documents with many tikz figures is to use tikzexternalize. I add the following lines to my document definition:

Today I had to increase the main memory of my LaTeX installation yet another time and it required quite a while to collect the information again. Therefore, I am pasting my steps here as a future reference.

The last update of R’s tikzdevice (0.7.0) broke all my manually tuned graphs and now I have way too large margins, symbols and text sizes, etc. Even though this update was actually a fix to the previously broken tikzdevice (it simply needed insane amount of margins compared to the other output devices due to fishy metrics), I had workarounds in each graph which I had to fix now - again - manually.

I always forget how to configure siunitx correctly in the preemble of a LaTeX document. What makes it worse it that newer TeX distributions deliver version 2 while older distributions still use version 1 and both use different configuration variables. If you use version 1, you’d probably want to use the following configuration: