Why do I get a white figure background when exporting a figure with another background color?

I have a figure with a black figure background and a black axes background. My axes and labels are white. When I export this figure (e.g. to emf format) the figure background is reset to white and so I cannot read the labels anymore. How can I avoid this behaviour?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This is an issue of setting the right preferences for exporting the figure in MATLAB 7.1 (R14SP3) when using other background colors than white.

There is a default setting 'w' (for white) in the figure menu under File > Export Setup > Rendering > Custom Color. When you remove the checkmark, the background color will not be reset.

Programmatically, this can be done using the property InvertHardCopy of the figure.

surf(peaks);

set(gcf,'Color',[0.2 0.2 0.2]);

set(gcf,'InvertHardCopy','Off');

print('-f1', '-r600', '-djpeg', 'peaksfig');

A detailed explanation about printing and exporting in the current release of MATLAB is given at the following link:

 <http://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2012b/matlab/creating_plots/how-to-print-or-export.html>