from the desk of stinkpot

make high-quality, publication-level figures in matlab

April 22nd, 2007 by Lawrence David

i had always been irked by how easy it was to make figures in matlab, but how crummy they looked when saved.  i felt slightly embarrassed handing in such ugly figures for my homework; a journal editor would be seized with anaphylactic shock if i tried submitting matlab figures.

i’ve finally stumbled upon the solution, however: the eps level-2 file format.  try saving your figures like such:

saveas(gcf,’my_figure.eps’,'epsc2′);

prepare to be amazed. figures fonts no longer make you want to put out your own eyes; diagonal lines show no evidence of pixelation, even when you’re zoomed in.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

if that was helpful ...

check out the other tips and tricks i've compiled on these pages. you might learn something else interesting!

4 Responses to “make high-quality, publication-level figures in matlab”

1. on 01 Oct 2008 at 8:15 am   Tom

   Indeed saving it as a vector format will do the trick, but if a Matlab figure contains too many items it “magically” transforms into a bitmap again.

   Be aware.

2. on 13 Oct 2008 at 7:00 pm   Papa

   Pls, how can i insert a figure in MATLAB. That is inserting a graph into another

3. on 28 Jan 2009 at 8:42 pm   Ilana

   Also, here is a matlab script that lets you put latexed text into your figures, creates an eps, and then it all compiles together when you latex your document. Worked great for me.

   http://www.mathworks.de/matlabcentral/fileexchange/4638

4. on 17 Feb 2011 at 1:18 am   Daniel Cuneo

   print -depsc filename.eps does the same thing…

   I found myself browsing though your tricks again…recalling that my latest MATLAB plot looked awful, I tried the saveas
   function, then remembered the one I used to use…

   cheers