matlabfrag

A matlab figure to .eps and .tex file exporter, similar to LaPrint

Description

matlabfrag is a function which exports a Matlab figure to .eps and .tex files for use in LaTeX/pdfLaTeX/LyX. It is inspired by LaPrint, but is intended to be more WYSIWYG, by respecting figure handles better.

Some of the advantages of matlabfrag compared to LaPrint are:
- Much more emphasis on WYSIWYG.
- Handles figures that need the OpenGL or Z-Buffer renderers.
- Text objects are sized correctly (such as with a legend).
- Tick labels are handled better.
- Reduced number of options (which could also be viewed as a disadvantage).
- A great user manual ;-)

To include the figures in LaTeX, pdfLaTeX and LyX I recommend the pstool package. More information can be found in the User Guide.

Please email any bug reports to me (see my account for more details). I'm unlikely to notice any bug reports posted in the comments.

This is version 0.6.16 of matlabfrag, uploaded 04-Apr-2010.
- Fixed a bug that occurred when a figure wasn't frontmost.

Acknowledgements

La Print inspired this file.

This file inspired Matlabfrag To Pdf, Convert Plot4 Publication, and Mat2fig Conversion From A Matrix To A Figure.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.8 (R2009a)
• Other requirements: Matlab r2007a or later.

[kevin]

 

[Nick]

Fantastic little gem of a script!

However I've had some issues with labels not being coded in the PostScript file properly.. The number key and label is in the .tex file.. But appears to be missing it's partner in the postscipt.. And hence appears as '001' etc when processed. Has any one overcome this issue?

Cheers,
Nick.

[Tobias]

This is a great tool! Best way to prepare matlab figures for LaTeX. Thank you!

[Bernhard]

Great work.

Only question is, why is it not naturally included in MATLAB?

[Peter]

Thank you for an extremely useful tool.

To avoid warning messages, when supplying absolute paths, you might want to replace

if ~exist(['./',pathstr],'dir')

with

if ~exist(['./',pathstr],'dir') && ~exist(pathstr,'dir')

or something...

[Koen]

Great script!

I found that a cause of axis scaling not being handled properly can be the use of axis() with either of the arguments inf or -inf. This messes up the placement of the replacement string. Replacing the values with a numerical value fixes the problem.

Hopefully someone will find this useful!
Koen

[Nicholaus Halecky]

Hey Zebb,
I am a huge fan of LaTeX (used it to write my dissertation), and had I known of your function -- well, my life would have been a bit different. Very nice work.
Two comments:
1) The sortrows function in MatLab 2011a has been changed to perform a check on input array with ismatrix, and as such, throws an error within matlabfrag. I made a simple fix by changing the sortrows to sort as below (lines 262 to 282), however, I didn't check if this changes the sort logic:
% Sort by text size first
%[Y,I] = sortrows(cell2mat( PsfragCmds(:,4)))
[Y,I] = sort( cell2mat( PsfragCmds(:,4) ) ); %#ok<*ASGLU> Required for backward compatibility
PsfragCmds = PsfragCmds(I,:);
% Now sort by colour
[Y,I] = sortrows( cell2mat( PsfragCmds(:,5) ), [3 2 1] );
PsfragCmds = PsfragCmds(I,:);
% Now sort by font angle
[Y,I] = sort( cell2mat( PsfragCmds(:,6) ) );
PsfragCmds = PsfragCmds(I,:);
% Now sort by font weight
[Y,I] = sort( cell2mat( PsfragCmds(:,7) ) );
PsfragCmds = PsfragCmds(I,:);
% Now sort by whether it is 'fixed width'
[Y,I] = sort( cell2mat( PsfragCmds(:,8) ) );
PsfragCmds = PsfragCmds(I,:);
% Now sort by label type
[Y,I] = sort( PsfragCmds(:,9) );
PsfragCmds = PsfragCmds(I,:);
clear Y
2) How does matlabfrag handle background color in text annotations? I am trying to publish a few statistics and an equation on the plot, but haven't had much luck.

Thank you again, it's really an incredible function,
Cheers,
Nicholaus

[Benjamin]

 

[Frederick]

Thanks for that Zebb!

[Zebb Prime]

Herwig: The use of single dash or double dash with the --shell-escape option depends upon your LaTeX distribution. On my system, both variants work.

Fredrick: That is a pstool question, not a matlabfrag question. If you read the pstool documentation you'll see that you can specify \includegraphics options as options to \psfragfig, i.e.

\psfragfig[width=10cm]{...}

That said, the workflow I designed matlabfrag for is to resize the figure in matlab first, so as to prevent things like text running on top of tick labels, etc.

As for your other problem, I don't know what the problem it. Try updating your version of pstool.

[Frederick]

How do you resize a figure in pdftex using the command \psfragfig{S10MeanPeakt111}? And for me I cannot specify a eps/tex combination that is not in the same directory for some reason.

[E.]

In the above replace get(0,'ScreenSize') by get(gcf,'Position'). You need to have opened a figure of standard size.

[E.]

Wonderful function!

However, had some problems using figures, generated with matlabfrag, as subfigures in LaTeX/pdfLaTeX. The resizing part messed up the label positions so that label ticks and labels itself overlapped. For me the trick was to resize the figures in MATLAB on beforehand. Here is howto:
First get screensize using:
get(0,'ScreenSize')
Size the latter two numbers corresponding to your scale and plot the required figures using:
figure('Position',[x y scaled1 scaled2])
where x and y equal the first two results of the screensize and the scaled1 and 2 represent the scaled values.
This did the trick for me.

[Stefan Stefan]

Hi there,

matlabfrag helped a lot to write good looking papers. Now I have a problem with intersecting axes labels and label ticks. I sent you an email with the necessary files to reproduce the problem. Looking forward to hear from you.
Regards,
Stefan

[Herwig Peters]

Hi, excellent tool!

I'd like to point out one thing (typo?) in the userguide.pdf, section 4.3. The userguide says you have to insert -shell-escape in order to make it work with pdflatex. But, I needed to insert --shell-escape, note the double -!

Cheers
Herwig

[Martin]

Great work !!

I uploaded a small script to convert the tex and eps files into one pdf.

File ID is #28545.

[Allan Leal]

This is a great work!

I am wondering how could I get the EPS file already with the <<final>> format, I mean, with the tags already converted? I don't want to work with the TEX file.

Thanks.
A.

[Allan Leal]

 

[Juan]

I manage to solve it. Apparently my windows version of pdftex does not support the font I was using in the rest of the document.

[Juan]

I am trying with a Contour plot.(pdflatex + pstool) Everything looks perfect except for the contour numbers. They don’t appear in the pdf files (actually the number tags are there in the eps). Does it happened to somebody else ?.

[Rory]

I am testing this because I get ridiculously big files with LaPrint, which according to Laurin's comment above should not happen with this package. However, the eps files that this produces are still far too large (~75mb vs 6mb when I do a simple print command).
Thanks in advance, if I can get this working it will be a real lifesaver for my thesis!

[Zebb Prime]

Hi Michael,

The way I would do it is to just set all fonts to the size corresponding to \small. Of course this won't change if you wish to change to document fontsize.

You could open the output .tex file, and edit the \matlabtextA, etc commands to use \small instead of \fontsize.

The reason I chose to use \fontsize is that the label positioning is dependent upon the chosen fontsize. This way, if it looks ok on the screen, it should look ok in the document too.

Regards,
Zebb

[Michael Friedlander]

Great package!

Suppose that I want to have all text in final figure typeset using \small, i.e., all figure text should be slightly smaller than the default tex-document's font. Any suggestions on how to do this?

Thanks!
Michael

[Zebb Prime]

Hi Benjamin,

The version checking bug should already be fixed in the latest version.

Regards,
Zebb

[Benjamin]

So I decided to post a small solution.
Changes lines 48-53 from

v = version;
v = sscanf(v,'%i.%i');
v = eval( sprintf('%i.%i',v(1),v(2)) );
if v(1) < 7
error('matlabfrag:oldMatlab','Matlabfrag requires Matlab r2007a or newer to run');
end

to

v = version;
v = sscanf(v,'%i.%i');
if (v(1) < 7) || ((v(1) == 7) && (v(2) < 4))
error('matlabfrag:oldMatlab','Matlabfrag requires Matlab r2007a or newer to run');
end

[Benjamin]

It's a really great script. I used it to create the plots of my masters thesis. At the moment there is a small error with Matlab 7.10 . The script needs Matlab 7.3 or newer, but in the script 7.10 is recognized as 7.10<7.3 .

[Zebb Prime]

Hi all,

Please disregard my use of \include in my comments above. Please use \input instead.

Cheers,
Zebb

[Rob Campbell]

 

[Zebb Prime]

Hi All,

Viton: That should be possible, but I don't have time to do implement anything like that at the moment.

Andrey: That should only be necessary if you aren't grouping the figures properly. They placing \begin{psfrag} \end{psfrag} around your \include and \includegraphics.

Vincent: There isn't a way to do this using the default axis labels in matlab. You could however convert the axis labels to text objects. There are several functions that do this in the FEX, one is http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/23841-format-tick-labels-extended (disclaimer - I haven't used this file myself)

David: What version are you using? You haven't provided enough information for me to diagnose the problem. Make sure you are using the latest version, and email me an example of the problem.

Hans: I did a quick test, and it looked the same in the document as it did on the screen. The easiest way to fix this would be to manipulate the position handles of legend, and if necessary the axis.

I also want to remind everyone that the comment section isn't a very good medium for receiving support.

Cheers,
Zebb

[Hans Henrik Sievertsen]

Hi,
Thanks, it is very great.
I have a problems with the location of my legend. It always seem to overlap with the xlabel when I use SouthOutside. Is there a way to avoid this?
Thanks in advance
Hans

[David]

I have a lot of success with matlabfrag, but I find that the print command still resizes the legend box, it is very frustrating.

If I force the rendereer to be opengl or zbuffer the legend box is in the right place but the box lines on the legend and the figure are blurry.

Please please can somebody help me with a solution for this problem?

[vincent ssemaganda]

Hi Andrey,

one way to solve your problem is by rescaling the eps plots to smaller sizes.
try
\includegraphics[scale = 'value < 1']{filename}

[vincent ssemaganda]

This happens when I rescale the plots to be used in a sub plot

[vincent ssemaganda]

Thanks alot! However in my tex plots axis labels seem to get closer to axes than they are in the actual matlab pics. Is there any way to space axis labels further away from axes?

[Andrey Sokolov]

Is it possible to make matlabfrag output unique psfrag command numbers for every eps file? I'm including two eps files in one figure using the subfigure command, and the labels get all mixed up because some of the psfrag command numbers are the same for both files. I've tried to move the \input{*.tex} commands right before the relevant \subfigure and it worked but it had some undesirable side effect, ie the figures got stacked vertically instead of being side by side. So basically I want to include the *.tex files for both figures beforehand without messing the labels. I can change the numbers in the eps and tex files by hand of course but it's too ineffective.

[Viton Vitanis]

Excellent piece of code! I'm wondering whether there is some automatic way to modify the size of the legend box during latex compilation so that it adapts to any font being used there.

[Paolo Bocchini]

Very nice work!

[Laurin]

I've been looking for exactly this program for about a year now. :)

Until now I used LaPrint for almost all of my Matlab -> Latex printing jobs. For me the biggest drawback of LaPrint is that it can only handle the Matlab "painters" renderer. In my diploma thesis I have many pcolor and isosurface plots (with nice phong lighing). With the "painters" renderer the first resulted in huge file sizes even when "downsampling" my data matrices to reasonable sizes while the latter where completely impossible to realize. With matlabfrag now even transparency works!

With matlabfrag I can now also put all my graphics in a subdirectory without manually modifying all of the tex-files like in LaPrint!

Keep up the good work!

[Tor]

Extraordinary work! A lot better than LaPrint, I rarely need to fight this script. However, I do occasionally get a legend box that's too small for the legend text (the right hand side of the box cuts of a few letters). Usually solved by adding a "\," or two.

[Zebb Prime]

Hi Matt,

I generally leave the font as the default (Helvetica). That said, matlabfrag should work with any font you choose in Matlab.

Cheers,
Zebb

[Matt]

Hi, I'm finding this code (and pstool) to be very useful.

I would, however, like to know what font you use in matlab in order to get your legend sizing to work out in pdflatex.

[James Housley]

Excellent! Found it much more useable than laprint, and now can cope with transparency (use the opengl renderer).

[Kamil Wojcicki]

Great job, thanks!

[Will Robertson]

 

[Zebb Prime]

Hi Rui,

The idea is that ['number'] gets written out to the eps file, and the tex file contains instructions (using the psfrag LaTeX package) to substitute it for the original label.

In LaTeX you can do this in two ways:
1. Load the psfrag package, and then when including the graphics, include the tex file:
\include{figure.tex}
\includegraphics{figure.eps}
-- This way only works with latex.

2. Load the psfrag and pstool packages, and use the command
\psfragfig{figure}
instead of the includegraphics command. This works for both latex (from pstool v1.2 on) and pdflatex.

Please contact me via email if you need more information.

Cheers,
Zebb

[Rui]

hi.. great program. congratulations
but how can i avoid the axis text having this format: " [ 'number' ] "