Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Export of Figures

Converts 3D and 2D MATLAB plots to the scalable vector format (SVG).

Description

Added preliminary version plot2svg_beta that supports filter, clipping, animation, and tickmark extensions that go beyond the Matlab functionality. SVG filters are a great tool to create stylish plots! Try it out!
Before you start using this new features have a look at the tutorial. More information and examples can be found on my webpage.
Tested browsers and editors for SVG filters:
  Opera 9.64 -> yes
  Firefox 3.5 -> yes
  Inkscape 0.46 -> yes (some limitations)
  IE + RENESIS -> no

Please report any problems with plot2svg_beta that are not visible with plot2svg! Plot2svg will become obsolete for the next version.

IMPORTANT: Use 'v6' graphics option for Matlab versions > R14! (see below)

Editors for the SVG file format can be found at http://www.inkscape.org or http://www.sodipodi.com.

Usage:
> plot2svg % opens a file dialog to plot the active figure
    or
> plot2svg('myfile.svg', figure handle, pixelfiletype)
    
  pixelfiletype = 'png' (default), 'jpg'

IMPORTANT: Firefox 1.5 may hang if too many linear shaded patches are used in the figure.

See http://www.juergschwizer.de to get more informations

Supported Features
- line, patch, contour, contourf, quiver, surf, ...
- markers
- image (saved as linked png pictures)
- grouping of elements
- alpha values for patches
- subplot
- colorbar
- legend
- zoom
- reverse axes
- controls are saved as png pictures
- log axis scaling
- axis scaling factors (10^x)
- labels that contain Latex commands are interpreted (with some limitations):
\alpha, \Alpha, \beta, \Beta, ... \infity, \pm, \approx
{\it.....} for italic text
{\bf.....} for bold text
^{...} for superscript
_{...} for subscript

How to use SVG files in HTML code
<object type="image/svg+xml" data="./mySVGfile.svg" width="140" height="100"></object>

Changes in Version 20-Jun-2009
- Bugfix '°','±','µ','²','³','¼''½','¾','©''®'
- Bugfix 'projection' in hggroup and hgtransform
- Added Octave functionality (thanks to Jakob Malm)
  Bugfixe cdatamapping (thanks to Tom)
  Bugfix image data writing (thanks to Tom)
  Patches includes now markers as well (needed for 'scatter'
  plots (thanks to Phil)
- Bugfix markers for Octave (thanks to Jakob Malm)
- Bugfix image scaling and orientation
  Bugfix correct backslash (thanks to Jason Merril)
- Improvment of image handling (still some remaining issues)
  Fix for -. line style (thanks to Ritesh Sood)

Changes in Version 28-Jun-2009
- Improved depth sorting for patches and surface
- Bugfix patches
- Bugfix 3D axis handling

Changes in Version 11-Jul-2009
- Support of FontWeight and FontAngle properties
- Improved markers (polygon instead of polyline for closed markers)
- Added character encoding entry to be fully SVG 1.1 conform

Changes in Version 13-Jul-2009
- Support of rectangle for 2D
- Added preliminary support for SVG filters
- Added preliminary support for clipping with pathes
- Added preliminary support for turning axis tickmarks

Changes in Version 18-Jul-2009
- Line style scaling with line width (will not match with png
  output)
- Small optimizations for the text base line
- Bugfix text rotation versus shift
- Added more SVG filters
- Added checks for filter strings

Changes in Version 21-Jul-2009
- Improved bounding box calculation for filters
- Bugfixes for text size / line distance
- Support of background box for text
- Correct bounding box for text objects

Changes in Version 31-Jul-2009
- Improved support of filters
- Experimental support of animations

Changes in Version 16-Aug-2009
- Argument checks for filters
- Rework of latex string handling
- 'sub' and 'super' workaround for Firefox and Inkscape

Limitations:
- axis scaling factors for 3D axes
- plot object of Matlab R14 not supported (use 'v6' switch instead)
- 3D plot functionality limited (depth sorting, light)

Example of a SVG file is included to the zip file.

Reports of bugs highly welcome.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 6.5 (R13)

Other Files

demo_3d_plot2svg.m,
demo_svg_water.jpg,
demo_svg_water.m,
demo_svg_water.svg,
gradient.png,
license.txt,
matterhorn_small.jpg,
plot2svg.m,
plot2svg_beta.m,
readme.txt,
sphere.png,
sphere.svg,
sphere.svgz,
svgAnimation.m,
svgBoundingBox.m,
svgClipping.m,
svgComposite.m,
svgDisplacementMap.m,
svgFlood.m,
svgGaussianBlur.m,
svgImage.m,
svgLuminanceToAlpha.m,
svgMorphology.m,
svgOffset.m,
svgSpecularLightingDistant.m,
svgTile.m,
svgTurbulence.m,
temperature_perfect.jpg,
temperature_perfect.svg,
tutorial_filters.jpg,
tutorial_filters.m,
tutorial_filters.svg,
tutorial_plot2svg_beta.m,
water_stones.jpg

[Heiko Marx]

Nice! What I first found was that for zoomed plots the data exceeds the plot area. And the files become quite large. And having lots of controls causes having lots of jpegs. But because we use the .svg-format very often, this is a very useful tool with a lot of potential! Thank you!

[tom mod]

 

[Charlie Eckelston]

Great tool for editing plots for publications

[Matthias Schabel]

Very nice work. Default plot size appears quite small when imported into Illustrator - 400% magnification required to make image fit standard page. Otherwise great help for preparing plots for publication.

[Wladimir van der Laan]

You just saved my day :-) I tried so many things, like exporting .ai and trying to import it in inkscape, but it all yielded corrupted plots or nothing at all. With this program, it works perfectly.

[Ken Senior]

Running the plot2svg command on my Windows XP R14SP3 gives the error:
??? Error: File: plot2svg.m Line: 1763 Column: 1
The function "get_projection" was closed
 with an 'end', but at least one other function definition was not.
 To avoid confusion when using nested functions,
 it is illegal to use both conventions in the same file.

[E Dinnat]

Just tried the 3D functionality on a few samples. Works great. Excellent and very usefull function. Too bad light is not exported and interpolated shading is not excellent, but I guess that SVG (or any vector format) isn't suited for so complex rendering.

[Yordan Kyosev]

Thank you Juerg!

[m m]

Get confused if you manually alter the axis scales: e.g. Inkscape still reports layers of the 'original' size I think. Also non-size preserving in pixels at the least. Needs specifically size setting in e.g. Inkscape before external users will recognise the pixel size settings. Otherwise, very goodl

[Kris De Gussem]

Should be part of Matlab itself

[Timothy Withheld]

this piece of code is amazing. the svg exports work perfect with inkscape which is _exactly_ what i needed.

[Monsieur Truc]

Thanks, this is great and should be implemented natively in Matlab.
Tip : if you want smaller files, convert the multilines objects (curves...) into pathes with inkscape and use the 'simplify' tool.

[S. Barth]

Great! Spent too much time to find something comparable.

[Benjamin Watts]

Excellent function, I will use this alot!

Bug: setting XTick with any numbers outside of the set xlim in the figure will cause an error in plot2svg.

[phox hat]

Just what I needed!

[bass atallah]

Works well for the most part. Gives an error and doesn't converst bar graphs though.

[J. V.]

Hi

I don't see why doesn't Matlab have an "export to SVG" option yet. Juerg Schwizer did a great job, but it is too much for a single person to implement the full support for SVG.

It works ok for simple graphics. But it fails with transparencies and flat FaceColor. Take the example in the documentation for the "patch" command

vert = [0 1 1;0 2 1;1 2 1;1 1 1];
fac = [1 2 3;1 3 4];
tcolor = [1 1 1;.7 .7 .7];
patch('Faces',fac,'Vertices',vert,'FaceVertexCData',tcolor,'FaceColor','flat')

plot2svg 'matlab_patch_example.svg'

[Jean-Francois Dupuis]

To handle bar plot, just use the backward compatibility flag such as : bar('v6', ...);

[bahram houchmandzadeh]

Great work. For must stuff we do, matlab plots are not that sophisticated and the package just works.

[PONTHEP VENGSUNGNLE]

Great job,It is very interesting
Thank for good experience
From thailand

[bassam atallah]

Great little application. It is helpful. A few comments.
Doesn't seem to deal correctly with:
1) When background axis 'Color' is set to 'none' (you get a none white background)
2) Doesn't support histogram plots in the form of 'bar' or 'stairs'

[Stijn Klaassen]

Great tool for exporting graphs to Inkscape!
Get an error when making a plot using errorbar:
"??? Input argument "projection" is undefined.Error in ==> plot2svg>axchild2svg at 706 [x,y,z] = project(linex,liney,linez,projection);
Error in ==> plot2svg>axchild2svg at 1121 group=axchild2svg(fid,id,axIdString,ax,group,paperpos,get(axchild(i), 'Children'),axpos,groupax);
Error in ==> plot2svg>axes2svg at 459
group = axchild2svg(fid,id,axIdString,ax,group,paperpos,axchild,axpos,groupax,projection);
Error in ==> plot2svg at 139 group=axes2svg(fid,id,ax(j),group,paperpos);"

Anybody an idea for a workaround?

[jhgjh ouyou]

 

[Frouke H]

I got the following error message:
"??? Attempted to access xg_label_end(5); index out of bounds because numel(xg_label_end)=4.

Error in ==> plot2svg>axes2svg at 545
                    label2svg(fid,grouplabel,axpos,ax,xg_label_end(i),yg_label_end(i),convertString(axlabelx(i,:)),'Center',0,'top',1,paperpos,scolorname,exponent);

Error in ==> plot2svg at 139
        group=axes2svg(fid,id,ax(j),group,paperpos);"

What do I do wrong?

[Jarek Tuszynski]

Great tool.

[Geoff Adams]

Very nice function. However, I believe I have found a bug. On line 1121, "axchild2svg" is called without the "projection" argument. Adding it in seems to fix the problem. So to fix the bug:

--At line 1121, replace:
group=axchild2svg(fid,id,axIdString,ax,group,paperpos,get(axchild(i), 'Children'),axpos,groupax);
--with:
group=axchild2svg(fid,id,axIdString,ax,group,paperpos,get(axchild(i), 'Children'),axpos,groupax,projection);
--Done.

[Sam R]

This is excellent. Matlab allows you to save figures in illustrator's format, but it does not handle transparency of 3D planes. This script does and makes it possible to have a vectorial file of 3D surfaces with transparency. Thanks!

[Kaushik Ghose]

This is a great script! Thank you for making it.
I use inkscape to edit the svg files and I find the following issues:

1. I need to hand code the font into the file (i.e. I need to force
textfontname = 'Arial';
)

2. I need to remove the "pt" from all the font size descriptions

Thanks
-Kaushik

[r. h.]

Bug report. Used without arguments.

??? Attempted to access cdata(2,:); index out of bounds because size(cdata)=[1,21].

Error in ==> plot2svg>gouraud_patch2svg at 1208
                face_color2 = cdata(j-1,:);

Error in ==> plot2svg>axchild2svg at 861
                gouraud_patch2svg(fid, group, axpos, x(faces(p,:)), y(faces(p,:)),
                cdata, linestyle, linewidth, edgecolorname, face_opacity,
                edge_opacity,id)

Error in ==> plot2svg>axes2svg at 459
group =
axchild2svg(fid,id,axIdString,ax,group,paperpos,axchild,axpos,groupax,projection);

Error in ==> plot2svg at 139
        group=axes2svg(fid,id,ax(j),group,paperpos);

[Jason Merrill]

This is fantastic. I think this may allow me to dump Illustrator in favor of Inkscape. One cross-platform thing: on Unix/Mac, files always get saved with an extra backslash in front of them. A quick fix is to replace the explicit string '/' with filesep in the addBackSlash subfunction (lines 1652-1653 in plot2svg, and lines 1232-1233 in plot2svg_2d). Here's the corrected version:

function strString=addBackSlash( strSlash)
% adds a backslash at the last position of the string (if not already there)
if ( strSlash(end) ~= filesep)
    strString = [ strSlash filesep];
else
    strString = strSlash;
end

I suspect this could all be cleaned up (i.e. you wouldn't even need the addBackSlash function) using the fullfile function.

[nino guttuso]

 

[Dmitry Babin]

Bug report (MATLAB R2008a, not tested with older versions):
1. LaTeX commands are not interpreted (e.g. \bf appears in SVG text strings)
2. When trying to use it with surf plots, the following error message appears:

??? Error using ==> get
There is no 'Units' property in the 'surfaceplot' class.

Error in ==> plot2svg at 87
originalFigureUnits=get(id,'Units');

[Mat Hunt]

Interoperability with octave would also be a good idea, I get the error message (with octave):
   Matlab to SVG converter version 22-Jan-2006, Juerg Schwizer (converter@juergs
chwizer.de).
   Warning: Future versions may no more support older versions than MATLAB R12.
error: `uiputfile' undefined near line 52 column 29
error: evaluating if command near line 51, column 1
error: called from `plot2svg' in file `/home/mat/plot2svg.m'

[Dmitry Babin]

A correction to my previous post (from 2008-05-15):

1. LaTeX commands ARE interpreted, but only when enclosed by curly braces. For example:
 xlabel('\bft\rm, [sec]')
isn't interpreted correctly;
 xlabel('{\bft}, [sec]')
is OK.

2. About "surf" and "mesh" plots: my mistake... I tried to use it in this way:
 h = surf(.........)
 plot2svg('filename.svg',h)
The correct way to get a handle is:
 h = figure(1)
 surf(.........)
 plot2svg('filename.svg',h)

[sylvain lalure]

 

[Mazen Saied]

Hello,

Great work and congratulations for this macro. I have found a bug to correct. It concerns surface intersections when you plot 2 or more surfaces (surf, mesh, ...). I notices that when you export in SVG format, plotted surfaces are stacked one on the other and their intersections disappear.

Nevertheless, all the rest is perfect.
Thank you

[george melinkus]

How long will it take The Mathworks to include this functionality in Matlab by default?! It has been asked multiple times and would be a BIG plus considering the growing support for the format, both closed and open source.

Just wondering... big thumbs up for the author of this export script!

[Georg Stillfried]

very nice, works well

[Georg Stillfried]

unfortunately I recieve an error when I try to export patch and surface objects (Matlab 7 on Linux)

>> plot2svg('figure.svg')
   Matlab to SVG converter version 22-Jan-2006, Juerg Schwizer ([e-mail]).
??? Input argument "projection" is undefined.

Error in ==> plot2svg>axchild2svg at 902
            [x,y,z] = project(points(1,:),points(2,:),points(3,:),projection);

902 [x,y,z] = project(points(1,:),points(2,:),points(3,:),projection);

[Sebastien Besson]

Hi Georg,

I experienced the same problem and solved it by replacing lines 1121 and 1130 :
group=axchild2svg(fid,id,axIdString,ax,group,paperpos,get(axchild(i), 'Children'),axpos,groupax);
by
group=axchild2svg(fid,id,axIdString,ax,group,paperpos,get(axchild(i), 'Children'),axpos,groupax,projection);

Hope it will help you.

[Mike Schachter]

plot2svg doesn't work for higher MATLAB versions (such as 7.6), but here is a fix. Put this near the top of plot2svg_2d in order to make things work:

if (str2num(matversion(1)) >= 7)
    disp(' Using grandparent id due to higher matlab version.');
    id = get( get(id, 'Parent'), 'Parent');
end

[Mike Schachter]

Just to be specific, you can paste that code at line 40 of plot2svg_2d.m.

[Mike Schachter]

By the way, this is the most awesome and necessary script I've ever used. When it stopped working I wanted to die and thought the world around me was crumbling to pieces, leaving me shattered and vulnerable to the cruel biddings of Adobe Illustrator.

But now those days are over, I can breathe a breath of joy knowing that I can continue to use Inkscape for making figures! Hurrah!

[Mike Schachter]

Sorry, kind of screwed up there - what I was trying to do was plot a handle that comes from a call to the polar(...) command. plot2svg works fine for figure handles. I retract my fix, but not the whole dying-without-plot2svg thing.

[Florian]

 

[Georg Stillfried]

The advice by Sebastien Besson did the trick. Thanks!

[Ritesh Sood]

found a little bug on line 823 of plot2svg_2d.m which was causing firefox to hit a parsing error. The original line code is
case '-.',pattern = 'stroke-dasharray="100pt,25pt,25pt,25pt,"';
which should be changed to
case '-.',pattern = 'stroke-dasharray="100pt,25pt,25pt,25pt"';
(The bug is the trailing `," after the last 25pt.)
---------------------------------------------------
There are a few issues that I'm seeing in the exported svg:
1) subscripted labels like "f(t_1,t_2)" are appearing verbatim; subscripts are not getting interpreted as I believe they should.
2) I have a figure with two 2D contour plots differentiated by one set of contours being solid and the other set dot-dashed. The svg output is unfortunately quite poor: one can hardly make out that there are two sets of contours.
----------------
For (1) above I have an idea: SVG+MathML
I am using MathML to render a table of parameters -- which requires some math typesetting, greek symbols, matrices -- to go along with the plots. The way I am doing that is to have tex (well, itex actually) markup in the file and pass the file through itex2MML.
Maybe the same process will work with the svg figures. Enclose the math in the labels in a pair of
`$"s (requited by itex), set Matlab's Interpreter to Latex so that the fig file comes out alright, create an svg and filter through itex2MML. Let's see how that goes.
If only Matlab had native SVG support, wouldn't have to jum through all these hoops...

[Benjamin]

Bug report:
If I set ytick manually, but then also set ylim so that not all yticks are displayed, then I get an "Index exceeds matrix dimensions" error.

Fix:
line 1019 of plot2svg_2d:

indexnz=find(labelpos ~= 0)

should be changed to:

labellimit=get(ax,'YLim')
indexnz=find(labelpos ~= 0 & labelpos >= labellimit(1) & labelpos <= labellimit(2))

and obviously, line 1003 should be changed similarly for the x-axis case.

[Vincent]

very usefull tool
It would be nice if someone could compile the bug fixes listed above and release a updated version... (probl. Juerg is already working on that...?)

[Cesar Roda Neve]

I have found a bug. When i write in the axis label a text including super or sub script, just something like:

Text_{Material}

It just ignore the super or sub thing and write it together...

TextMaterial

It should be nice if someone has an idea of how to fix this.

[Juerg Schwizer]

Hi Cesar Roda Neve,
This is not a bug in plot2svg. It's a limitation of Inkscape and Firefox. Other browsers like Opera or Chrome can handle it. The SVG code for sub and super script is conform to the SVG 1.1 specification. I'm aware of the limitation and will try to find a workaround for Inkscape and Firefox.

[T]

 

[Kristin B.]

 

[Eddie Seven]

yay, it works. I wrap a rsvg-convert after it to get a png file. even for simple plots, it's scandalous how bad the matlab internal plot saving utilities are.

[me]

great!
without this presenting results would suck!

btw.
in order to ensure utf 8 encoding, change two lines in plot2svg.m
:
142: fid=fopen(finalname,'wt', 'n', 'UTF-8'); % Create a new text file
143: fprintf(fid,'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?><!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd"&gt;\n'); % Insert file header

[Rob Campbell]

I love it! I see I shall be using this a lot.
Seems to work very well in Firefox (all I've tried so far).
Am about to use it for generating HTML reports of analyses.

[Aslak Grinsted]

I would like to use plot2svg for producing figures for publications. (I am often having problems with matlabs print when there is anything transparent in the plot.)

That means i would like to use absolute units for the size. I would also like to specify the font size, linewidth in units of points. Many journals have strict requirements on these.