Is it possible to reuse a part of a tikz image

To fill in @philosodad's first way, this does what you want and obeys DRY:

\begin{scope}[yscale=2.0,yshift=-3,xscale=0.1]
  \foreach \i/\mu/\xmin/\xmax in {1/5/0/10,2/10/5/15} {
    \draw[domain=\xmin:\xmax] plot[id=gauss\i] function{exp(-(x-\mu)*(x-\mu)/2/2/2.0)/sqrt(pi)/2};
  }
\end{scope}

The scope environment isn't required (you can put those options on the \draw line) but it does make the line shorter. :-)

If you want to put that in multiple places, just assign it to a box.

\usetikzlibrary{matrix}

\newsavebox{\gaussians}
\savebox{\gaussians}{
  \begin{tikzpicture}
    \begin{scope}[yscale=2.0,yshift=-3,xscale=0.1]
      \foreach \i/\mu/\xmin/\xmax in {1/5/0/10,2/10/5/15} {
        \draw[domain=\xmin:\xmax] plot[id=gauss\i] function{exp(-(x-\mu)*(x-\mu)/2/2/2.0)/sqrt(pi)/2};
      }
    \end{scope}
  \end{tikzpicture}
}

\begin{tikzpicture}
  \node[matrix of nodes] {
    \usebox{\gaussians} & foo & \usebox{\gaussians} \\
    bar & \usebox{\gaussians} & baz \\
  };
\end{tikzpicture}

Edit: Following Yossi's suggestion, I rewrote this to use a saved box rather than a macro.


With TiKZ 3.0 pics it's easy to reuse part of your image. You need to declare the reusable part inside a pic and place where you want, even inside a matrix.

\documentclass[border=2mm,tikz]{standalone}

\tikzset{
    mygauss/.pic={
        \draw[yscale=2.0,yshift=-3,xscale=0.1,domain=0:10] plot[id=gauss1]          
                    function{exp(-(x-5)*(x-5)/2/2/2.0)/sqrt(pi)/2};
        \draw[yscale=2.0,yshift=-3,xscale=0.1,domain=5:15] plot[id=gauss2] 
                    function{exp(-(x-10)*(x-10)/2/2/2.0)/sqrt(pi)/2};
    }}
\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}

\matrix (A) [column sep=5mm, row sep=3mm] {
\pic{mygauss}; & \pic{mygauss}; & \pic{mygauss}; \\
\pic[red]{mygauss}; & \pic{mygauss}; & \pic{mygauss}; \\
\pic{mygauss}; & \pic{mygauss}; & \pic[green,dashed]{mygauss}; \\};

\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

enter image description here

As usual with gnuplot we neeed to compile with -shell-escape as in pdflatex -shell-escape myfile.tex


People seem to be answering a different question...I may be wrong but I think you are looking for \savebox? Would this not save latex from re-rendering the TikZ code every time? I don't know how many times you need to put those plots in your document, but if you are going to define a macro to do it, you may consider putting the whole thing in a \savebox:

\newsavebox{\myneatfigurethatineedalot}
\savebox{\myneatfigurethatineedalot}{

A bunch of latex code, tikz and 

what-not that you need to place on every corner of every page

}

\usebox{\myneatfigurethatineedalot} %use this wherever you want it!

I think that \savebox is better than a macro in this case, because a) what is in the box is self-contained (the typesetting of the content of the box does not depend on the location in the text) and b) it is relatively expensive to render and by using a \savebox you are telling the texengine to simply reuse the result of the rendering, while the macro would tell it to re-render everything from scratch.

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