I stumbled upon a piece of software called KtikZ. The screenshot in that page, together with the fact that Doc-View mode is included in the new Emacs 23, inspired me to try that idea with tikz2pdf. With help from folks from gnu.emacs.help, I came up with the following function:

(defun split-for-tikz2pdf ()(interactive)(TeX-run-style-hooks "tikz")(TeX-run-style-hooks "tkz-berge")(split-window-horizontally 60)(other-window 1)(split-window-vertically 15)(find-file "tikz2pdf_temp.pdf")(doc-view-mode)(auto-revert-mode 1)(other-window 1)(let ((file-path (buffer-file-name)))(when file-path (shell) (comint-send-string (get-buffer-process (current-buffer)) (format "tikz2pdf -v %S \n" file-path)))))

which gives something like this, when applied at a buffer with a .tex file:

Unfortunately, the buffer for the .pdf file is not in Doc-View mode after executing the function. One has to go to that window and do M-x doc-view-mode. After that, sometimes the picture is not generated correctly and one has to reload manually with g. Other useful Doc-View key bindings are + and -.

You might want to use my simple AucTeX style files tikz.el and tkz-berge.el.

See also: Original Source by Rafael

Note: The copyright belongs to the blog author and the blog. For the license, please see the linked original source blog.