I've been using the attached patch for the last few years and I've meaning to send it here/start a discussion about ob-latex.el since I used it pretty much daily to write tikz figures in org mode. So I'm glad to see this discussion has been started!

I've found it to be incredibly productive to use babel to develop tikz diagrams as I can make come changes and quickly `org-ctrl-c-ctrl-c` to render them in the same buffer.

I think when I made this patch I had been caught by some of the quirks of the svg export. For example, sometimes I would have some latex equation which I use ~org-latex-preview~ on as I was writing it, but then it would fail to render as mathjax upon html export since I would use some latex package that isn't available under mathjax. So by using ob-latex I could easily fix this by using the ~:file .svg~ header and get a nice html export. However due to the different way of assembling the ~.tex~ file sometimes ~org-latex-preview~ would work but ob-latex wouldn't. I think my use case may be fairly common and so I think ob-latex really should be updated so svg uses the ~org-latex-preview~ code. o

Also I think the ~.tikz~ extension doesn't really make any sense since one really can but arbitrary tex code in such a block, and I think that's why I renamed it in my patch. However I'm now realizing that this evaluation method probably doesn't make much since `:tangle` will already do this, with the added benefit of handling noweb references correctly. So perhaps this should be removed and document using tangling in lieu of ~:file *.tikz~?

PS: I'm not currently subbed to this mailing list, so please try to cc me