How can I use the PUBLISH function to create a PDF document in MATLAB 7.0 (R14)?

Solution:

As of MATLAB 7.0 (R14), you can create a PDF document by using the PUBLISH function to convert your MATLAB file to LaTeX first before converting to the PDF format. You will need proper TeX tools first. Two of the TeX tools we have used are MiKTeX and GhostScript, but other TeX tools should work as well.

To install either of these products, you can go to their respective websites:

http://www.miktex.org/
AND
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

Next, use the following code to convert your file to LaTeX. In this example, we choose myfile.m to be the name of your file.

publish myfile latex

You can then create the following MATLAB function file as a wrapper to quickly convert the LaTeX file to PDF file format. Please make sure that LATEX.EXE and DVIPDFM.EXE are in your system path.

function pdf(file)
location = which(file);
d = fullfile(fileparts(which(file)),'html');
cmd = ['cd ' d ' && latex ' file '.tex && dvipdfm ' file ' && ' file '.pdf'];
system(cmd);

Then, the following line will do this conversion:

pdf myfile