Creating a colormap in tikz/pgfplots, no axis
You can make the axis take up no space by setting scale only axis, width=0pt, height=0pt, hide axis
.
To be able to set the range of the colorbar, you have to provide a dummy plot. Then you can set point meta min
and point meta max
to control the range:
\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
hide axis,
scale only axis,
height=0pt,
width=0pt,
colormap/jet,
colorbar horizontal,
point meta min=18,
point meta max=45,
colorbar style={
width=10cm,
xtick={18,20,25,...,45}
}]
\addplot [draw=none] coordinates {(0,0)};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
\pgfplotscolorbardrawstandalone[options]
does exactly that. It seems it was created for illustrating the tikz docs:
\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\pgfplotscolorbardrawstandalone[
colormap/jet,
colorbar horizontal,
point meta min=18,
point meta max=45,
colorbar style={
width=10cm,
xtick={18,20,25,...,45}}]
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
The result is the same but it's much simpler to use and to implement!