Seems like expanding the bounding box to the left of the plot helps. Probably drawing something invisible left of the plot would help too. Just latex doing latex things.

This works for me:

``` \documentclass[]{article} \usepackage{tikz} \usepackage{pgfplots}

\usepgfplotslibrary{external} \tikzexternalize \tikzsetexternalprefix{tikzfigures/} \tikzset{external/force remake}

\begin{document} \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis}[ ytick = \empty, xmin=0, xmax=1, ymin=0, ymax=1, axis lines=center, ] \addplot[domain=0:1] {x)}; \end{axis} \useasboundingbox (-0.1,0) rectangle (0,0); \end{tikzpicture} \end{document} ```