Legend looks very weird

Hello!

I'm having trouble plotting legend.

The items in the legend are overlaid on top of each other, and no matter what I try, they always look that way. Could anyone help me to make it look normal again, and tell me what is wrong with it?

Thank you so much in advance!!!

            % now draw
            figure;
            plot(tmid,Cer,'ko-',tmid,Put,'ro-',tmid,Caud,'bo-');
            xlabel('Time (min)'); ylabel('Radioactivity (Bq/mL)');
            legend('Cerebellum','Putamen','Caudate');
            ax = gca; ax.YAxis.Exponent = 0;
            cd(paths.figures)
            print('-dpdf','-bestfit',[ num2str(IDs(id)) num2str(d) '.pdf']);

[Guillaume]

Could you reduce the size of that massive image? When you attach the image, Answers lets you choose a scaling factor.

Is the image you've posted a screenshot of the figure or the result of the conversion to pdf? (I.e. is the problem with legend or with print?

Unrelated to your question, avoid using cd. It's slow and dangerous (in that it can change what m files are visible).

print('-dpdf','-bestfit',fullfile(paths.figures, [ num2str(IDs(id)) num2str(d) '.pdf']);

would save in the correct folder without needing to cd.

[Alex Y]

Thank you Guillaume for the suggestion and sorry about the image size! The screenshot is from the figure, but it looks the same on pdf as well...

[Guillaume]

Can you replace the initial figure call with

figure('Renderer', 'painters');

and see if that fixes the issue?

See also Resolving low-level graphics issues

[Alex Y]

The problem still persists... I also tried specifying OGL implementation.

Answer 1

[Harsha Priya Daggubati]

Hi,

Can you share the data or atleast dimensions of the data you are trying to plot, since this issue is not reproducible at my end.

Answer 2

[Yair Altman]

Run the following and check if you still see the same problem:

plot(1:3,1:3,'ko-', 1:3,2:4,'ro-', 1:3,3:5,'bo-');
legend('Cerebellum','Putamen','Caudate');

If you see the same problem it could mean that your legend function is corrupted. Run whos('legend','-all') and check if you have an unexpected version of the legend function on your Matlab path.

If you don't see the same problem, it might be a problem with your data in some strange way. In any case it will help narrow down the possibilities.

[Star Strider]

A similar problem (and apparent diagnosis but not cure) has been posted in Markers and text in legend appear misaligned. Considering that the plot is with respect to brain nuclei, EEGLAB could be the culprit.

[Guillaume]

From the various questions we've seen over the years, it seems that EEGlab has a nasty habit of replacing essential matlab functions with their own, which ends up breaking matlab in all sort of interesting ways.