Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Export of Figures

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

Description

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Export of Figures

Converts 2D & 3D Matlab plots to the scalable vector format (SVG). This format is specified by W3C (http://www.w3.org) and can be viewed and printed with internet browsers.

Added preliminary support of filter, clipping, 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 blog http://www.zhinst.com/blogs/schwizer/.

Tested browsers and editors for basic SVG support (no filters, no animation):
  Opera 9.64,10.50, 10.63 -> yes
  Firefox 3.5,3.6 -> yes
  Inkscape 0.46, 0.47 -> yes
  Chrome 8.0.552.210 beta -> yes
  Internet Explorer 9.0 beta -> yes
  Internet Explorer 8.0 -> no
  Internet Explorer + RENESIS -> yes

Tested browsers and editors for SVG filters:
  Opera 9.64,10.50, 10.63 -> yes
  Firefox 3.5,3.6 -> yes
  Inkscape 0.46, 0.47 -> yes (some limitations)
  Chrome 8.0.552.210 beta -> yes
  Internet Explorer 8.0, 9.0 beta -> no
  Internet Explorer + RENESIS -> no

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.

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.zhinst.com/blogs/schwizer/ 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 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 06-Mar-2010
- Improved support of filters
- Experimental support of animations
- Argument checks for filters
- Rework of tex string handling
- 'sub' and 'super' workaround for Firefox and Inkscape
- Bugfix for log axes (missing minor grid for some special
  cases)
- Bugfix nomy line #1102 (thanks to Pooya Jannaty)
- Bugfix minor tickmarks for log axis scaling (thanks to
  Harke Pera)
- Added more lex symbols
- Automatic correction of illegal axis scalings by the user
  (thanks to Juergen)
- Renamed plot2svg_beta to plot2svg

Changes in Version 12-04-2010
 - Improved Octave compatibility

Changes in Version 05-05-2010
- Bugfix for ticklabels outside of the axis limits (thanks to
  Ben Scandella)

Changes in Version 30-10-2010
- Improved handling of empty cells for labels (thanks to
  Constantine)
- Improved HTML character coding (thanks to David Mack)
- Bugfix for last ')' (thanks to Jonathon Harding and Benjamin)
- Enabled scatter plots using hggroups
- Closing patches if they do not contain NaNs

Changes in Version 10-11-2010
- Support of the 'Layer' keyword to but the grid on top of
  of the other axis content using 'top' (Many thanks to Justin
  Ashmall)
- Tiny optimization of the grid display at axis borders

Limitations:
- axis scaling factors for 3D axes
- 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)

[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">\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.

[Zboud]

Great, too bad LaTeX-interpreted text() results are not interpreted...and {} don't help, I get $v$ or {$v$} in the SVG file ... :'(

[Felix Zoergiebel]

Great job! This really helps me plotting translucent patches, which is just not possible with matlab functions. However, there are small problems.
1: latex \cdot is not processed. I added
tex=strrep(tex,'\cdot','& # 8901;'); (without spaces...)
to line 2351 of plot2svg_beta.m
2: I have an hggroup with text objects that are placed outside of the axis (custom labels). These labels are not plotted before I set the parent of each of them to the axis.

[Felix Zoergiebel]

Yet another bug when plotting the y-axis on the right side of the plot-box: label positions are inverted, i.e. labels are not [1 2 3 4 5] but [5 4 3 2 1] (data is still plotted as in figure)

[Juerg Schwizer]

Hi Felix, many thanks for the feedback! Bug 1 is already implemented together with additional tex elements. These changes will soon be published together with a minor label bugfix. I was not able to reproduce bug 2 & 3. Could you please send me an example. Many thanks. Juerg.

[Juergen]

Really great! Thanks a lot!

just one small problem with log scaled axes. To reproduce:
figure; plot(0:5, 0:5);
set(gca, 'xLim', [0 5]);
set(gca, 'xScale', 'log');
plot2svg

Solution: always set lower xLim > 0, if you use log scaled axes.
(I know: quite obvious! :-) ...but this case could simply come true)

I guess this exception could be trapped in function get_projection (around line 1913): if xi(1) == Inf ...

[Juerg Schwizer]

% Example how to adjust your figure properties for
% publication needs (answer to Aslak Grinsted's question)
s = figure;
% Select the default font and font size
% Note: Matlab does internally round the font size
% to decimal pt values
set(s, 'DefaultTextFontSize', 10); % [pt]
set(s, 'DefaultAxesFontSize', 10); % [pt]
set(s, 'DefaultAxesFontName', 'Times New Roman');
set(s, 'DefaultTextFontName', 'Times New Roman');
% Select the preferred unit like inches, centimeters,
% or pixels
set(s, 'Units', 'centimeters');
pos = get(s, 'Position');
pos(3) = 8; % Select the width of the figure in [cm]
pos(4) = 6; % Select the height of the figure in [cm]
set(s, 'Position', pos);
set(s, 'PaperType', 'a4letter');
% From SVG 1.1. Specification:
% "1pt" equals "1.25px"
% "1pc" equals "15px"
% "1mm" would be "3.543307px"
% "1cm" equals "35.43307px"
% "1in" equals "90px"

[Gladnon Galoshev]

 

[Rahul]

 

[Patrick Mineault]

 

[Patrick Mineault]

It didn't work immediately with a figure with a /patch/ (the outlines were correct but the colors didn't show up). Got it to work by switching to the /fill/ command instead. The output is exceedingly accurate compared with the eps exporters based on the painters renderer which tries to simplify/merge outlines and messes up a lot of small details. Excellent work!

[Patrick Mineault]

Bug report:

I ran into trouble when attempting to use ImageMagick's convert command line program with an svg generated by plot2svg (e.g convert myplot.svg myplot.png). The aspect ratio of the output was way off. However when I loaded the same file in Illustrator it came out fine. Comparing Illustrator and plot2svg output, I found the following solution:

Replace line 176 with:

fprintf(fid,'<svg preserveAspectRatio="xMinYMin meet" width="%0.3fpx" height="%0.3fpx" viewBox="0 0 %0.3f %0.3f" ',paperpos(3),paperpos(4),paperpos(3),paperpos(4));

As an added bonus, I now get correct crop marks when I load the file in Illustrator.

[Ryan]

Thank you! I was constantly adjusting figures in Inkscape that did not copy properly from Matlab. Problem soved!

[Brock]

By far one of the most useful pieces of code I've come across. I used to trace Bezier curves on top of .png images *by hand* in a vector graphics editor to get .svg images for papers and posters. I can't even begin to describe how much time/frustration this will save me! Thanks so much!

[Jonathon Harding]

This is working excellently for me! I can finally output graphs in vector format with fonts other than Helvetica.

One minor bug report: (La)TeX strings that end with a single character after the last curly brace will drop that character (e.g. a_{sub}b would only display a_{sub}).

This can be fixed by changing line 2613 to:
if lastValidCharacter <= length(StringText)
The important part is the less than or equals, rather than a strict less than.

[Yohai]

Works great for simple plots.
However, it doesn't work for pcolor. It creates a big file (11M) which doesn't look like the figure I've created.
Can it be a Linux-compatability problem?

[Eric Tittley]

 

[Catarina Avelino]

I found this tool great except for one thing that for me is not working. If we consider the code:

function exp
  set(gcf,'Color',[0.95,0.95,0.95])
  [X,Y,Z] = sphere(30);
  mesh(X,Y,Z,'facecolor',[0.7 0.7 0.7],'edgecolor','none'); hold on;
  alpha(.7);
  A = [0,0,1]';
  B = [1,0,0]';
  v3 = cross(cross(A,B),A);
  t = linspace(0,atan2(norm(cross(A,B)),dot(A,B)));
  v = A*cos(t)+v3*sin(t);
  plot3(v(1,:),v(2,:),v(3,:),'LineWidth',0.2,'Color',[0.3,0.3,0.3])
  view([80, -40])
  axis equal, hidden off,
  hold off
  axis off
  plot2svg('exp.svg')
end

we see a sphere with a line drawn where one part lies in front of the sphere and another part lies behind the sphere (the figure has transparency). In the matlab figure there is disctintion of those two different parts on the line colors. In the svg file we saw that there is no distinction of colors, i.e., the color of the line is the same whatever the line is ahead or behind the sphere.

There is a way to create the svg file with different colors for the objects created in front and behind the sphere? Or to make the lines behind dotted?

I would appreciate your help!
Catarina

[Juerg Schwizer]

Dear Catarina,

Many thanks for your feedback. Unfortunately, plot2svg has at the moment no support for depth sorting of graphics objects. Only depth sorting of surfaces is supported. To support an universal dept-sorting I have to design a z-buffer algorithm from scratch or use a c++/java library. Or I would need access to the Matlab internals. At the moment, my plot2svg has to generate the svg elements just from the user data. Also the svg element saving has to be changed as I need some further buffering and sorting before writing the svg file. Thus, it would be a major change.
For your application, you have to split the line into two parts and sort the elements according their z-position in the view space. There are some code fragments in the plot2svg code that do the same thing for surfaces.
I'm sorry that I can give you no better advice at the moment. Let's hope that the Matlab graphics engine itself gets some upgrading with improved support of all the new technologies like svg, filters, animation, ...
Juerg

[Benjamin]

Small bug report.
My plots have an axis label coded by:
ylabel('Oscillator Strength (eV^{-1})')
but the svg file is missing the final ')'.

This is a great piece of code, well done!
Thanks,
Ben

[Carlos]

This does sound like a great tool, but on matlab R2009a in linux, the example demos (tutorial and svg_water) do not run successfully. They both fail to embed the background figures.

[Matthias Pospiech]

I found that your code works well and provides results that match very well the wanted linestyles and fonts specified. However the plot is cropped at the upper boundary which should not happen.
I have posted an example of this here:
http://www.matthiaspospiech.de/blog/2010/10/11/matlab-figures-solving-export-problems/3/#toc-plot2svg

It would be great if this could be improved.

[Tsz Ho Yu]

An excellent solution for generating transparent patches in Matlab!

Yet, I found that the legend are not rendered in my SVG files. Once I guess it is because the legends are plotted outside the axes, but there is no legend rendered in my plots even I put them back inside the plots...

[Frederic Roux]

same problem as Yohai. pcolor plot has white mesh/grid overlaid on top. how can i get rid of it?

[Tommy Sebastian]

Highly useful code! One small problem, however... for 3d plots, colors do not seem to come up correctly. Using RGB to define a green surface [0 1 0] results in a green surface in the figure, but a blue surface for the svg image... similar problems for other colors as well. Suggestions?

[Jacob]

Bug report:
When there are more than one line in the x or y label they will be written on top of each other. It creates the two lines as different text objects so the error can be corrected through inkscape.

The plot looks fine in matlab using this command:
xlabel({'this is line one', 'and line 2'})

[Kotya Karapetyan]

BUG REPORT:
Plot setting command

xlabel('Wavelength, nm', 'FontUnits', 'normalized', 'FontSize', 0.03);

causes plot2svg to crush with

??? Error using ==> plot2svg>convertunit at 2804
Unknown unit normalized.

[Nik F]

Not /perfect/, but pretty amazing for what it does!

[Jonathon]

Bug report, with a proposed fix:
Legend text "drifts" down and left in SVG's with repeated calls to plot2svg on the same plot. This also affects the plot in MATLAB when it gets redrawn (try maximize + restore on the window).

It is caused by converting the text units to 'Data' on line 2311. Converting between the 'Data' and 'normalized' units will cause the text position value to gradually change (this can be checked by comparing get(text_handle, 'Position') before and after repeated calls to set(text_handle, 'Units', 'data') and set(text_handle, 'Units', 'normalized')).

Proposed fix: keep track of the original position in addition to the original units:
@@ -2305,6 +2305,7 @@
 function text2svg(fid,group,axpos,paperpos,id,ax,projection)
 global PLOT2SVG_globals;
 originalTextUnits=get(id,'Units');
+originalTextPosition = get(id, 'Position');
 if PLOT2SVG_globals.octave
        set(id,'Units','data');
 else
@@ -2363,6 +2364,7 @@
     label2svg(fid,group,axpos,id,x,y,'',textalign,textrot,textvalign,lines,paperpos,font_color,0)
 end
 set(id,'Units',originalTextUnits);
+set(id,'Position', originalTextPosition);

[Thomas Clark]

I haven't used this really extensively, but I've just thrown a _very_ complex figure at it (coloured slice plots, multiple quivergroup objects, etc) and it handled the lot perfectly.

SO impressed, thanks Juerg!

[Roeland]

Great work on this excellent tool! I found a small bug though, which causes images to have two color channels flipped vertically. On line 1973 "for j = size(pointc,3)" should be changed to "for j = 1:size(pointc,3)".

[Mr Smart]

 

[Andrew Scott]

This is really good.
One tiny point, on line 182:
[pathstr,name,ext,versn] = fileparts(finalname);
Needs 'versn' removing in 2011b.

[Christian]

Very useful for exporting high quality figures that use the fill function. Matlab really likes converting any figure that contains fill to raster, but this function exports them easily and adobe illustrator reads the files correctly.

[Sébastien]

 

[Alexandre]

Great work!
However there seams to be a problem when I try to export a plot where I used the command "axis square". In the SVG, the axis are completely squeezed horizontally...

[Vahid Bokharaie]

It is very helpful, specially for somebody like me who wants to export figures to LaTex (through inkscape). I have successfully used plot2svg for a figure and it worked perfectly, however, for another figure, I got the following message:
Matlab/Octave to SVG converter version 10-Nov-2010, Juerg Schwizer ([e-mail]).
Warning: The fourth output, VERSN, of FILEPARTS will be removed in a future release.
> In fileparts at 35
  In plot2svg at 182
Warning: NaN found in Y, interpolation at undefined values
will result in undefined values.
> In interp1 at 179
  In plot2svg>gridLines at 709
  In plot2svg>axes2svg at 975
  In plot2svg at 221

and the warning goes on and on for every 'gridline' following the first. And the output is almost empty. It is a 3x2 subplot with two titles, 6 ylabels and 2 xlabels.

[Vahid Bokharaie]

I found the solution and mention it in here in case somebody else faces similar situation. The problem arose due to the fact that I uses:
axis([0 inf 0 10])
normally, Matlab interprets 'inf' in axis command as a hint to specify the upper bound of the axis itself, which is does and the plot is OK. But for some reason, plot2svg has an issue with that. Changing it to something like:
axis([0 5 0 10])
will fix the problem.

[Jan Neggers]

When using matlab2011b i get this:

Error in plot2svg (line 182)
[pathstr,name,ext,versn] = fileparts(finalname);

The solution is simple, just change line 182 to:
[pathstr,name,ext] = fileparts(finalname);

Anyway nice tool!

[Petter]

ylabels end up too close to the yticks on the axis in the SVG file. The Matlab figure is correct.

[Petter]

The following seems to fix the ylabel issue:

if get(ax, 'YLabel') == id
    x=fontsize*1.25*1.2;
end

after x is computed in text2svg.