export_fig
This function saves a figure or single axes to one or more vector and/or bitmap file formats, and/or outputs a rasterized version to the workspace, with the following properties:
- Figure/axes reproduced as it appears on screen
- Cropped/padded borders (optional)
- Embedded fonts (pdf only)
- Improved line and grid line styles
- Anti-aliased graphics (bitmap formats)
- Render images at native resolution (optional for bitmap formats)
- Transparent background supported (pdf, eps, png, tiff)
- Semi-transparent patch objects supported (png, tiff)
- RGB, CMYK or grayscale output (CMYK only with pdf, eps, tiff)
- Variable image compression, including lossless (pdf, eps, jpg)
- Optional rounded line-caps (pdf, eps)
- Optionally append to file (pdf, tiff)
- Vector formats: pdf, eps
- Bitmap formats: png, tiff, jpg, bmp, export to workspace
This function is especially suited to exporting figures for use in publications and presentations, because of the high quality and portability of media produced.
Note that the background color and figure dimensions are reproduced (the latter approximately, and ignoring cropping & magnification) in the output file. For transparent background (and semi-transparent patch objects), use the -transparent option, and set the axes 'Color' property to 'none' where desired. Pdf, eps and png are the only file formats to support a transparent background, while the png format alone supports transparency of patch objects.
When exporting to vector format (pdf & eps), and to bitmap using the painters renderer, this function requires that ghostscript is installed on your system. You can download this from:
http://www.ghostscript.com
When exporting to eps it additionally requires pdftops, part of the Xpdf package. You can download this from:
http://www.xpdfreader.com
Usage examples and tips can be found in the README section at:
https://github.com/altmany/export_fig/blob/master/README.md
A technical description of the various components can be found here:
http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/export_fig
This submission was originally created by Oliver Woodford. Yair Altman maintains this utility since Jan 2015.
When reporting bugs, please raise an issue via GitHub: https://github.com/altmany/export_fig/issues
Do not paste the error into the comments below - I will not respond to these.
Annu Singh (view profile)
Yu Zou (view profile)
Konrad (view profile)
Francisco (view profile)
Sathya Edamadaka (view profile)
Eyal Tal (view profile)
Can this be updated to work with axes created in App Designer?
Thanks
Josh Walker (view profile)
Please ignore previous comment, just needed to run it in "function" form. Absolutely great. Thanks for your hard work!
Chris Hu (view profile)
Sasha Nasonova (view profile)
You are amazing and wonderful. Thank you!
Nico Spo (view profile)
Jessie yu (view profile)
Jens (view profile)
Oleg Zinoviev (view profile)
addpath and use it! Thanks!
Taylor Allen (view profile)
Really nice add-on and is simple to use. This is great if you are wanting to overlay computed surfaces or scatter plots of data from an image over the original image and still maintain the quality. Super helpful in making nice figures for publications!
Fredrik Gustavsson (view profile)
When I use export_fig on an invisible figure ('visible','off') that contains uicontrols such as text boxes, push buttons, etc, mixed with graphs, the uicontrols do not get printed. If i do the same thing with the figure visible, everything gets printed. Is there a workaround/solution for this?
z8080 (view profile)
Very useful function, but it would be great if it also added support for EMF as it is after all the most MicrosoftOffice-friendly vector format!
Jonathan Müller (view profile)
Hi
I didn't manage to use this function within the App Designer environment.
I get the error "Undefined function 'export_fig' for input arguments of type 'matlab.ui.control.UIAxes'."
Is this type of object not defined for this function?
Is it furthermore planned to make this function work within App Designer?
Would be really helpful since the regular options (like print etc. ..) are also nopt (yet) available in App Designer.
Yu Xiao (view profile)
Mihai-Alexandru Dusmanu (view profile)
Joern Adermann (view profile)
Caetano Melone (view profile)
Mazin Mustafa (view profile)
Solve too many problems for me.
Hong Nguyen (view profile)
Nikhil Mukund (view profile)
Alexey (view profile)
M Reza Tavakol (view profile)
Lahcen ROUANI (view profile)
Li Jianmin (view profile)
michele fari (view profile)
Gianni Pedrizzetti (view profile)
Great job, allow high quality images. I allows to save (at high resolution and any format) exactly what is shown in MatLab.
Lara Román (view profile)
Mahak Singh Chauhan (view profile)
Jonas Allgeier (view profile)
Noé Jimenez Gonzalez (view profile)
FF (view profile)
I try to save a scatter plot with transparent color dots (FaceAlpha = 0.5). However, when I save the figure to pdf, the transparent effect disappear. I check online, and it said it is an issue has been fixed in export_fig. But I don't know how to get back the transparent effect of my scatter plot. Is there a method?
Z C (view profile)
A similar question as SG's came up. The pixels are not square and the figure is stretched. Any solution?
Li Carl (view profile)
Enhanced Metafile (EMF) is expected.
JIN YU ZHANG (view profile)
SG (view profile)
When I export a figure which is larger than the screen resolution with the "-native" option, the pixels aren't square anymore. Any idea how to solve this.
Pooya89 (view profile)
Håkon Ånes (view profile)
david samvin (view profile)
Bob DA (view profile)
Fan Yang (view profile)
Ali mehdizadehrahimi (view profile)
Lars Loetgering (view profile)
lian xiang (view profile)
Shane L (view profile)
Frederick Zittrell (view profile)
Diana Madrid (view profile)
Borys Kowalewski (view profile)
David P (view profile)
gdgc (view profile)
Ferit Akgul (view profile)
Ferit Akgul (view profile)
Thanks a lot for contribution. However, I cannot seem to export an image file with the original image's quality even though output image resolution matches.
imshow('file.png') --> displays at %33 zoom since image is 4000x1000 pixels
export_fig -native --> outputs image at the same resolution (4000x1000) BUT image is heavily pixelated. Original image quality is not preserved.
How can I keep original image quality?
David P (view profile)
Harry Chellis (view profile)
This is fantastic and makes life so much easier!
I have had trouble when exporting as a figure as a pdf the title always gets cut off though
Mohamad Hilman Nordin (view profile)
Debejyo Chakraborty (view profile)
Zhiyuan Mao (view profile)
Léopold (view profile)
Hello,
I have finally taken the time (actually a few minutes) to get the hand with it and I am fully satisfied of it.
It might seems trivial for most of you, but may I recommend that a short note (for instance in the description) describing how to use it be added?
I.e., that the user should unzip the zip file, place it wherever he wants in its local disk, then he should add in his code
addpath(genpath('C:\Users\...\altmany-export_fig-acfd348\altmany-export_fig-acfd348'));
and then his figure can be save calling
export_fig()
(and see export_fig file for details about available output and input arguments).
Hope that helps!
Homam BETAR (view profile)
ren ren (view profile)
It's really useful！ Thanks！
liangyu (view profile)
It is very useful. Thank you very much.
abderrazak chahid (view profile)
Thank you very much. It is very useful
To Minh Tan Le (view profile)
Guoqing Wang (view profile)
Jong Hwi Park (view profile)
ashkan ha (view profile)
Martin Storath (view profile)
Srikanth Gadicherla (view profile)
Easy to use. Excellent work!
Vojtech (view profile)
Lilla Horvath (view profile)
Stefano Sorti (view profile)
Niranjan Gowda (view profile)
Oscar Ricardo Sandoval Rodriguez (view profile)
Jeremy Priest (view profile)
Rongxin Zhang (view profile)
Thanks so much. And I downloaded the last version. I find that Matlab r2016a no longer has /SO, /DO, /DA, /DD in the file, the fix_lines function would not work. Could you please resolve that or release a r2016a compatible version?
fan Wang (view profile)
ALaddin KABALAN (view profile)
Thanks so much,
such an amazing tool.
I have a question please, how we can export figure in format (.fig) using this tool?
thanks
Patrick Hammer (view profile)
I use this code all of the time and love it. However, for my contourf maps with several axes or objects (like arrows), they take an inordinate amount of time to write to EPS. When I say a long time, I mean it might run for a day with no show of if it is even writing it, not even showing a filename in the folder it is being exported to. Do you have any suggestions on how I might speed this up? I use cropping to remove excess background space, CYMK for the journal I'm submitting to, and painters renderer. Any help would be appreciated, as this is beginning to drive me crazy. :(
AndyD (view profile)
Joe (view profile)
Josh Natanson (view profile)
Great tool.
Matt J (view profile)
I don't think the issue of 1 pixel extra padding was truly fixed. I see a faint rim around exported images when placed on a black PowerPoint background slide
Yair Altman (view profile)
@MichaelBevis - The Xpdf project was moved to http://www.xpdfreader.com on August 10, 2017. I updated the description text accordingly.
Sherlock Hsu (view profile)
babita verma (view profile)
Hi, I was collating few matlab figures to one pdf using export_fig.Is it possible to add a matlab figure to a specific page of the existing pdf?
I know append can be used to add figure to existing pdf file but the problem is every time i mess up with the sequence (of figures ) I have to redo all the figures (in one pdf) again. So was wondering if a matlab figure can be added to a specific page of the existing pdf file.
Michael Bevis (view profile)
This recommended link to xpdf software
> pdftops (install the Xpdf package): www.foolabs.com/xpdf
no longer seems to work, Is there another source for the xpdf package?
EP (view profile)
How do I fix dotted lines blurring together for a 3-D plot? The 2-D plots look great, but in 3-D they blur together. I'm making a pdf so I believe the painters renderer is being used.
Nikki Brown (view profile)
This worked a treat, thank you.
NING LIU (view profile)
Daniel Wong (view profile)
Mary Ann Harrison (view profile)
zhidong cao (view profile)
Julio Montecinos (view profile)
Hiroki Watanabe (view profile)
Jason McCune-Sanders (view profile)
DrZoidberg (view profile)
Kuifeng (view profile)
Nicholas D. (view profile)
Peter H Charlton (view profile)
Mélodie (view profile)
Awesome, thanx a lot!
wu jun (view profile)
Ander Cruz (view profile)
Daniel Niemann (view profile)
Very nice and helpful function! However, it seems to have a problem mit date axes. I want to use your function to improve the quality of some time series plots with dates on the x-axis. When using your function, the created matlab figure has the first (oldest) date at the very right side of the axis and all subsequent dates shifted to the left. Then, it exports the described figure and after exporting it, the axis changes to the correct order with oldest to youngest.
It would be great if you could look into this issue.
Best,
Daniel
Marcus Victor (view profile)
amelia grossman (view profile)
Alexander Potrafke (view profile)
Nathan Porter (view profile)
This is the best solution I've found for creating high-quality PDFs. It's a lifesaver when I want to include graphics from MATLAB in a LaTeX document.
jon erickson (view profile)
David George (view profile)
Statovic (view profile)
elvis ching (view profile)
nice tool!
but it doesn't work after I use the tool 'freezecolors' , what can I do with it?
Ringo Cheung (view profile)
Hi Yair,
Excellent app, easy to use. You save my day!
Thanks,
Ringo
Jeffrey Huang (view profile)
Silvana Palacios (view profile)
Genius! Thanks
Jianke Li (view profile)
Excellent work. Thumb up!
MANG TENG (view profile)
Anisa Oshafi (view profile)
I had been searching for this one and I finally found it. Well done!
Arthur Degeneve (view profile)
Thanks!
xinyu lei (view profile)
Mehdi BRAHIMI (view profile)
Dima (view profile)
Nicolas Chartier (view profile)
Seban (view profile)
Bernardo (view profile)
I often get an error saying that I don't have enough "thread space". I am appending 14 charts. What Could I do to solve that?
Dinant Kistemaker (view profile)
good stuff!!!
Veronika (view profile)
Please, I would like to transfer png images into tiff, but I don´t know, where I put (load) my images for this transfer. Because I have this error:
Error using get
There is no Binarizace_okoli_ 1.png property on the Root class.
Error in export_fig (line 265)
fig = get(0, 'Binarizace_okoli_ 1.png');
Can you advice me?
Thank you for your answer.
l l (view profile)
nice job man!
Andrea Finke (view profile)
Great! Works perfectly and saves me a lot of time.
Jay (view profile)
that's OK!
Jeremy Poindexter (view profile)
Mandeline Ferreira (view profile)
Shervan Gharari (view profile)
E_Z (view profile)
Lairenlakpam Joyprakash Singh (view profile)
Good function! However, it doesn't print axis values properly specially when there is something like x10(-15). My code is given below:
t = 0:1/4:1; % test range
xa = sin(2*pi*2*t);
plot(t,xa,'.-'); grid on;title('tom');
export_fig test.pdf -native -transparent
ty long (view profile)
Alexandre Laurin (view profile)
john doe (view profile)
JINGYI WANG (view profile)
Li Dong (view profile)
Jiaqi Chen (view profile)
SAI PRANITH (view profile)
Nathalie (view profile)
University Teknologi PETRONAS Farooq (view profile)
Hi,
I am plotting a grid of pixels in matlab and I have to overlay multiple grids on same figure using hold on (around 100). At the end figure become extremely heavy that if i zoom in a little portion of figure, it take computer to process an hour to zoom.
I was thinking to export figure on EPS format and then see the zoomed figure in EPS viewer. However, i am not able to see zoomed information of figure. Please let me know is it possible to preserve original figure information in EPS format so that when i zoom in EPS figure, I can see details just like in MATLAB?
Balasundaram Kadirvelu (view profile)
David (view profile)
Really useful function, thank you! However, there is a small bug that occurs when using the LineWidth option in conjunction with anti-aliasing:
figure(1), clf;
z = linspace(0,4*pi,250);
x = 2*cos(z) + rand(1,250);
y = 2*sin(z) + rand(1,250);
scatter3(x,y,z,'Marker', 'x', 'LineWidth', 4);
export_fig -a4
The saved figure will display points at default line width rather than the specified value.
Yusuf Said Eroglu (view profile)
Hello everyone, I used this function to export my figures to PDF. Then I used those pdf figures in my latex paper. When I uploaded the paper, I got "fonts not embedded" error. Is not this function supposed to embed the fonts already? What else should I do to not to get this error?
Joris Meurs (view profile)
Thomas Beauduin (view profile)
*.EMF would be great
Neil Arthur (view profile)
In order to export to the desired size, using:
set(gcf,'Position',figurePosition)
or
set(gcf,'PaperPosition',paperPosition)
does not work on its own. You also need to change the LooseInset property with
set(gca,'LooseInset',get(gca,'TightInset'))
Then use export_fig with no padding. Then the figure will print exactly to the desired size...Is this correct? Or am I missing something?
Leo Simon (view profile)
Sorry, I downloaded the latest option and the issue I noted earlier has been fixed.
Leo Simon (view profile)
It's a great addition, but there's one issue, which is that the padding option works only if options is a vector, which it isn't in my case. I hacked my code: on line 349 of export_fig, the third argument is hard-coded as a 1, if you change it to be options.bb_padding, then one can use the -p option generally. Hopefully this doesn't create other problems, but it seems to be working for me.
Aj_ti (view profile)
got to rate this full star. easy to use and handy
Simon Wyss (view profile)
Water_RC (view profile)
Water_RC (view profile)
aditya deshmukh (view profile)
Stefan Kopecz (view profile)
Keith (view profile)
I have enjoyed using this package for many years. Of recent I've started to use the Parallel Computing Toolbox (PCT). Are there any plans on getting export_fig to work with the PCT? PCT in parfor loops use the -nodesktop and -nofigure options which export_fig doesn't seem well set up to handle.
CS (view profile)
Chuong Nguyen (view profile)
one of the best toolbox. Thank you very much.
Igor Rutkowski (view profile)
Very useful. The figure quality is very good
elvin feng (view profile)
Good stuff here.
But I'm having an issue, when exporting to a tif and trying out the different options (-native, -q, etc) the output comes out the same resolution but the quality is diminished. 4x4 regions appear to be averaged into one which is quite the loss. Am I using the wrong options here to export or is this intended?
Alexandros Iliopoulos (view profile)
des (view profile)
This function has made my life a great deal better for the last 7 years. Thanks a lot to the developer/maintainer!
BUT: after the sudden death of my previous PC and subsequent complete system reinstallation, pdf figures exported with export_fig now come in Courier font. Makes for fancy retro hipster style graphics but is unfortunately not an option for any kind of publications, and no solution found locally so far - I had to go back to Matlab's built in print function ):
Has anyone experienced similar behaviour? Is the problem on Matlab's or Ghostscript's side, or somewhere else?
Some clues:
- The Font tab in the pdf's Document Properties states: "any (Embedded Subset)" - somewhere in the exporting process the figure's font (Helvetica, I believe) goes missing.
- current system specs: Windows 7, Matlab 2016b, Ghostscript 9.19
- Browsing through older pdf files, I found that any pre-reinstall combinations of various Matlab and Ghostscript versions up to R2015b / 9.15 worked. There, the pdf specifies "Helvetica" as its embedded font (and thus it also displays Helvetica/Arial).
des (view profile)
Oliver Karger (view profile)
Hi, this export package is great, the plot quality is so much better than with the built-in Matlab functions.
What I am wondering is in the pdf export, that the grid, which constists of faint grey lines in the Matlab figure becomes a dashed white line in the pdf export. Since I am using dashed lines to separate visually certain regions in the plot the now white dashed lines are overlapping with my annotation lines.
In the png export output the gridlines are still in a faint grey color.
Where can I change that to get the same result for the pdf export as well?
Thanks and best,
Oliver
susana (view profile)
Hello Yair,
Excellent contribution.. But i'm struggling with '-append' option because I want to put two gui figures in the same file and with your function I'm able to do that, but I loose some of the handles of my figures (e.g. uitables, string boxes..). Any ideas what could this be?
Best regards,
Susana
xueping li (view profile)
Thank you for your contribution
colorblindy (view profile)
Alexander H (view profile)
Mehmet Kivanc Çelik (view profile)
Adrian (view profile)
Thank you for filling the gap. This is extremely handy!
Adrian (view profile)
John (view profile)
Perfect. Thanks for your hard work. I had to download a newer version of export-fig to avoid eps2pdf error on 2015a.
Zhou Wei (view profile)
J S (view profile)
Thank you very much for this. If I was choleric, you would have prevented me from beating up my computer because of the annoying and shitty handling of the print function. Unsuccessfully tried for over an hour to get rid of the outer padding of saved plots. With your script, it was about 8 minutes, including download time.
Kiran Sagar (view profile)
I work on a computer where I don't have administrator rights. So, I can't install ghostscript. Is there any work around for that? (on Windows 7 - 64bit)
Aymerick ROUSSEY (view profile)
Awesome thanks
kawofengche (view profile)
Ian Bennett (view profile)
Very good program. However, I experience an issue when trying to export images with semi-transparent plotted points (using MarkerHandle.EdgecolorData and MarkerHandle.FacecolorData). The image that is exported does not show my points as semi-translucent, as they are in the plot. Instead, they show up as opaque.
Ilkka Sillanpää (view profile)
Gyan Raj Koirala (view profile)
@Miles, you can try out the following code to specify file name.
export_fig (sprintf('figure%d',mm));
I used it in a loop eg. for mm=1:5
cunjie zhang (view profile)
excelent
yangyang (view profile)
Great function. Saved a lot of time.
Miles (view profile)
I am having trouble specifying the filename when using this function...my code looks something like this:
...[code to make my figure]...
temp_str = strjoin({'filepath\',filename},'');
export_fig({temp_str})
When I do this, I still get a file saved in my directory which is named "export_fig_out.png". I was expecting that I would get a file with my "filename" that I specified.
Can anyone explain what I am doing wrong? I am slightly confused about the syntax for this function, I think.
Thanks!
Yue Chen (view profile)
Great function. Thanks for sharing.
Pietro Binel (view profile)
I have a question concerning crop! If I crop the image it won't be centered with respect to the plot box, because on the left side there is the YLabel. How should i modify the code so that the left space out of the box is equal to the space on the right (empty)?
many thanks!
Zhang (view profile)
Maxim Khomiakov (view profile)
laurie stephey (view profile)
renders EPS figure beautifully that was a mess when using the matlab defaults. thank you!
Yiling Xiong (view profile)
Daniel Cook (view profile)
This is a life saver. I've used it to produce excellent figures for publications as well as presentations.
M FRZ (view profile)
@ Yuri K: Thank you!
Emanuele Massaro (view profile)
Hello unfortunately it does not work with geowshow and an image over a map.
[Singapore, R] = geotiffread(file);
s = size(Singapore);
matrix = rand(s(1),s(2));
geoshow(Singapore(:,:,1:3), R)
hold on
geoshow(matrix, R, 'DisplayType', 'texturemap','facealpha',.5);
And here the file of the image
https://www.dropbox.com/s/55o13cmyzf206uo/Singapore.tif?dl=0
if we do
export_fig test.png
it will not see the transparency as posted here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39174437/matlab-how-to-save-a-geoshow-figure-with-facelpha/39175727?noredirect=1#comment65710757_39175727
Emanuele Massaro (view profile)
Hello unfortunately it does not work with geowshow and an image over a map.
[Singapore, R] = geotiffread(file);
s = size(Singapore);
matrix = rand(s(1),s(2));
geoshow(Singapore(:,:,1:3), R)
hold on
geoshow(matrix, R, 'DisplayType', 'texturemap','facealpha',.5);
And here the file of the image
https://www.dropbox.com/s/55o13cmyzf206uo/Singapore.tif?dl=0
Yuri K (view profile)
M FRZ: set(gcf,'color','w')
M FRZ (view profile)
Hi , thanks for the code. how can I remove the gray border of the chart? export_fig gives me a graph with gray border (chart area color). I couldnt find the answer to this question.
Cheers
Nat anunta (view profile)
Hanif (view profile)
Wiviann (view profile)
In order to make the code compatible with later MATLAB versions, you can change the code on line 14 in "using_hg2(fig)".
It should now be:
tf = ~verLessThan('matlab','8.4.0');
Earlier it was:
tf = ~graphicsversion(fig, 'handlegraphics');
Smilla (view profile)
Raymond Phan (view profile)
I've been using this script for years. Haven't gotten around to rating this script until now. Thanks for this script; awesome work!
zivan (view profile)
Great Work.
Gabriel Mocan (view profile)
awesome!
Andrea Carpi (view profile)
Neil Bhattacharjee (view profile)
Hi,
When I use this to convert a figure to a pdf/eps, I have "tiles" that are overlapping each other, causing for some filled circles to be cut in half, etc.
Is there any way to fix this?
Many thanks,
Qingjie (view profile)
Hi,
When I use export_fig to create .eps figures, both the x label and y label are not centered with respect to the axes; instead they are centered with respect to the cropped figures. I am using MATLAB2016a on a 64bit Ubuntu system. The following code can be used to demonstrate the problem described above:
x=0:0.001:3*3.1415926;
y=sin(x);
plot(x,y,'r');
axis([0 3*3.1415926 -1 1]);
xlabel('xxxxxxxxxxxxYxxxxxxxxxxxx','FontSize',16);
ylabel('yyyyyyyyyyyyXyyyyyyyyyyyy','FontSize',16);
export_fig test.eps -painters -r500 -q100 -cmyk -transparent;
Please help solve this problem. Many thanks!
Neil Bhattacharjee (view profile)
diane peurichard (view profile)
Very helpful, thanks!
Mingjian Cui (view profile)
Really helpful!
Felipe Uribe (view profile)
Dimosthenis Floros (view profile)
A great tool! Many thanks!
Louis (view profile)
If we change the size of the figure showing in Matlab, the eps image size changes. Is there an option to resize to a specific eps file regardless of the figure?
amin rasoulof (view profile)
A Lifesaver! I badly needed a transparent background in png output and it did it great for me.
Benjamin Bourguignat (view profile)
Hello, I have a problem. I have 3 figures figure(1), figure(2) and figure(3). I try to put figure_hanfle=findall(0,'type','figure') and export_fig(figure_handle,'-pdf') and I have an error message "Handle must be that of a figure, axes or uipanel"...
Could you help me? I want to have a figure in each sheets of a pdf. Thank you
Diana Li (view profile)
Thomas Bischoff (view profile)
It works really good. :-)
Thanks
Lindsay Anderson (view profile)
I am getting the following error in matlab:
Pdftops not found. Please locate the program, or install xpdf-tools from http://foolabs.com/xpdf
I too have installed xpdf as directed but am having no luck. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Todd Karin (view profile)
I believe I've found a bug. Please try the following code. You see that the peaks of the sine waves in the plot do not correspond with the peaks in the image.
--
clear
clf
x = linspace(0,30*pi,1000);
y = sin(x);
h(1) = axes('position',[.1 .15 .8 .3])
plot(x,y)
xlim([0 max(x)])
h(2) = axes('position',[.1 .45 .8 .3])
imagesc(x,1,y)
xlim([0 max(x)])
export_fig('testFig2.pdf')
Damir Dominko (view profile)
David Ho (view profile)
Hi there, this tool is very capable. I have been looking for a similar tool to help me export a 3D plot with large amount of data that allows me to encode the axes/text differently from the data.
I came across epscombine and figure2eps but the tools are outdated. (see my question in the link below).
I wonder if you would consider adding those features to export_fig? Or does matlab natively already support them?
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/277570-force-print-to-vectorize-axes-text-and-rasterize-the-rest
zlotnik (view profile)
Awesome work, Yair! Thank you very much for creating, documenting and sharing this great function for us.
--
Ilya
zlotnik (view profile)
Awesome work, Yair! Thank you very much for creating, documenting and sharing this great function for us.
--
Ilya
Luiz Carvalho (view profile)
I had to change the line 131 in crop_borders from
B = repmat(bcol,(b-t)+1+padding*2,(r-l)+1+padding*2,1,n);
to
B = repmat(bcol,[(b-t)+1+padding*2,(r-l)+1+padding*2,1,n]);
Otherwise, it didn't work.
Juan Carlos (view profile)
Quincy van den Berg (view profile)
bubbleguy (view profile)
I have been using your code for quite sometime and really like it. Thanks.
Recently, I noticed that in exporting the figure to, say, a PNG image, the minor ticks were not produced. Any suggestions.
Rongjie (view profile)
Bogdan Dzyubak (view profile)
Hi,
Thank you for the code!
Having one issue, though - the font of the labels on the colorbar becomes very tiny in the captured image. Any suggestions?
Linus (view profile)
Christian Clauß (view profile)
Hey, first thanks for this file!
I have a problem with exporting a figure to *.eps while using FontName 'Times' in Label and axis....
The exported *.eps image is always the same size and not depending on figure size.
My Matlab Version i use is R2015a.
Any suggestions?
Greetings and Thanks
Arabarra (view profile)
Arne Zimmer (view profile)
Hi,
thanks for this great file!
But one thing: I use R2015b. I copied crop_borders.m, export_fig.m, print2array.m and using_hg2.m to my matlab folder and then I use this command:
export_fig test2.tiff -native
The file test2.tiff is in both directions 2 pixels larger than the original!!
Is there missing something?? What is my error?
Thanks in advance!!
Pedro Mateus (view profile)
Loved all this project. Just one thing, when I try to export to eps or pdf I receive a message "export: Command not found." but everything is done...
Best, Pedro
Ivan (view profile)
Manuel Steinbrecher (view profile)
Firstly: I love your script Yair, it's great and I use it alot! It really produces nice figures!
Secondly: I got a problem lately. I currently writing my dissertation thesis so I would like all my PDFs in CMYK colorspace, which worked fine for the first figure I made (I think at least).
But with another figure, I run into troubles as it seems not to save the PDF content in CMYK space. I am not sure how to check on it (only finding expensive tools for this) but when I open it in CMYK color space in Illustrator, colors change dramatically... I get the following warning when executing the script with these parameters (-pdf -cmyk -r300):
Warning: Multiple images & lines detected. In such cases, the lines might
appear with an invalid color due to an internal MATLAB bug (fixed in R2014b).
Possible workaround: add a '-depsc' or '-opengl' parameter to the export_fig command.
> In print2eps at 232
In print2array at 110
In print2eps at 394
In export_fig at 625
In MYFILENAME at 311
Yes, I am using R2012b because we have some old code that won't work properly in the newer versions of Matlab. Do you think that might be an issue? Or any other ideas? Possibilities?
Would appreciate help :)
Best,
Manuel
Marc Crapeau (view profile)
Very precious tool, thanks a lot for that.
If it can help people: I had a problem using export_fig on figures created with functions of the mapping toolbox. The coast lines I was plotting together with my data were visible on the matlab figure but not on the file created by export_fig. To solve that I have used the uistack function to push my coast lines on top of the figure. For example:
line_coast=load('coast'); h_cl=plotm(line_coast.lat,line_coast.long,'k-');
% insert here complex mapping toolbox plotting operations
uistack(h_cl,'top');
export_fig('my_files.png')
Ivan (view profile)
rahmouni (view profile)
Harald Enzinger (view profile)
I would like to thank the original author and the current maintainer for their outstanding work. For me, export_fig is a must!
People who write papers in electrical engineering or related fields might also take advantage of bibget. This is a tool I wrote to easily retrieve BibTeX entries from IEEE Xplore.
With export_fig and bibget, writing papers is much more fun! :-)
Chang (view profile)
Youngmin Ha (view profile)
Ahmet Karakucuk (view profile)
Yair, can't thank you enough to show my appreciation for this function. I'd been using it for manuscript figures for over two years now.
Niekjuh (view profile)
Francesco Ferrante (view profile)
On El Capitan I cannot use export_fig to export into eps. Precisely, that's the error I get:
Pdftops not found. Please locate the program, or install xpdf-tools from http://foolabs.com/xpdf
I also tried to install xpdf as indicated, but still the same problem. Could anyone please help me?
Francesco Ferrante (view profile)
On El Capitan I cannot use export_fig to export into eps. Precisely, that's the error I get:
Pdftops not found. Please locate the program, or install xpdf-tools from http://foolabs.com/xpdf
I also tried to install xpdf as indicated, but still the same problem. Could anyone please help me?
Delyle Polet (view profile)
Simon Van Gorp (view profile)
Great script! Do you know how I can export a panel within a tabular. The problem is that the panel original dimensions are not kept but the dimensions of the tabular are taken.
Not sure if this is a bug or intended ? Is a workaround possible ?
neo (view profile)
This submission no longer (2014b onward) improves line styles in exported eps figures... As this file is still getting updates may be author should check this feature.
Tina Fuhrmann (view profile)
I forgot to add the correct search path, sorry! With the current version I do not get the warning any more.
Sorry for posting twice the last time ... is there any way to delete a comment?
JoseLuis (view profile)
Great tool! thanks for the contribution. I'm just having a bit problem. I'm loading and modifying an image of 360x360 pixels. When I export it with export_fig I get an image of 362x362. Could you give me a hint why? I'm using Matlab 2014b in Windows 8. Thanks!
Tina Fuhrmann (view profile)
Recently I get the following warning message in R2015b when using export_fig with boxplot and plot:
Warning: graphicsversion will be removed in a future release.
In using_hg2 (line 15)
In export_fig>parse_args (line 797)
In export_fig (line 216)
Thanks for the great file, I am using it since a few months and I am thrilled :).
Tina Fuhrmann (view profile)
Recently I get the following warning message in R2015 when using export_fig with boxplot and plot:
Warning: graphicsversion will be removed in a future release.
In using_hg2 (line 15)
In export_fig>parse_args (line 797)
In export_fig (line 216)
Thanks for the great file, I am using it since a few months and I am thrilled :).
Davide (view profile)
It works pretty fine with R2015b.
Dan K (view profile)
Note that saving to the clipboard was broken in R2015b. The fix is described in (apply at line 733):
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/246975-why-calling-to-java-class-methods-from-matlab-gives-undefined-variable-error-in-r2015b
Carlos Meza (view profile)
Excellent contribution. I have problems with (surfc,meshc) not generated vectors. When I am using surf if generated. Any solution?. Thank you very much for your collaboration
vthuongt (view profile)
Plotting works fine except of plots generated by using bar() or histogram().
There I can't get any transparent pdf files with vector graphics.
My command used was:
export_fig( 'histo.pdf','-pdf', '-transparent',figure(1))
vthuongt (view profile)
Plotting works fine except of plots generated by using bar() or histogram().
There I can't get any transparent pdf files with vector graphics.
My command used was:
export_fig( 'histo.pdf','-pdf', '-transparent',figure(1))
xikang (view profile)
Excellent when I want to get a transparent figure. Thank you very much!
Laura (view profile)
Andy Hueni (view profile)
PDF export works for me on Mac OS X El Capitan with R2015b after installing Ghostscript-9.16.pkg from http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/.
Had to move to this package as the Matlab fillPage and print functions I used till now messed it up after the Capitan upgrade, can't say if it applies to Yosemite as well.
Laura (view profile)
I've been using this function since forever to produce article-level figures with tight control of the dimensions
Yair Altman (view profile)
@MSch - export_fig works well on R2015b. The removal of the builtin Matlab ghostscript does not affect export_fig, since export_fig does not depend on it. You can install ghostscript executable directly from http://www.ghostscript.com and then export_fig will use it.
I remind everyone that I will not respond to feature requests or bug reports in this comments section - if you have something to request or to report then use Github's issues page to report and track your issue: https://github.com/altmany/export_fig/issues
MSch (view profile)
does not run with Matlab 2015b due to this: "MATLAB no longer ships with the Ghostscript® library. Remove all instances of code that use ghostscript.m." (see ReleaseNotes -> graphics -> Functionality being removed or changed)
I'll stick with 2015a till there's a workaroud, because I love this tool, especially the append_pdfs function :) Thanks!
David (view profile)
I have been using export_fig for a long time. After switching to R2015b, it threw a warning about using an obsolete function (graphicsversion, I believe) so I got the latest version. This produces an invalid eps file,so the eps2pdf crashes. Preview also cannot open the eps file. The error report from ghostscript is
Error using eps2pdf (line 107)
Error: /undefined in bdef
Operand stack:
dom --nostringval--
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval--
--nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval--
--nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push
1951 1 3 %oparray_pop 1950 1 3 %oparray_pop 1934
1 3 %oparray_pop 1820 1 3 %oparray_pop
--nostringval-- %errorexec_pop .runexec2 --nostringval--
--nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push
--nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1194/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:78/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: Invalid argument
Current file position is 64
GPL Ghostscript 9.16: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
Please help!
Yu GUAN (view profile)
Wonderful code
Cedric Noordam (view profile)
Great tool, really improves the look of my graphs. Only thing so far is that cropping is either on or off, with no option to crop only top/bottom or left/right. I need this to have proper scaling of the plotbox area in Latex files. I had to fix it by just disabling left/right cropping in the crop_borders.m file disabling it for good. Would be great to have specific command for left/right/top/bottom cropping on or off. That's just a minor thing though.
Ben Webber (view profile)
Great tool.
However, it seems that when text objects are positioned using normalized units, these positions are not properly retained when exporting the figure. I regularly use normalized units as I find these more intuitive. I'm using Matlab 2015b on MacOS 10.9 (the problem also occurs on Matlab 2012b).
Åsmund (view profile)
I have been trying to solve the transparency issue for a long time. Now it's finally solved! Thank you!
NenaV (view profile)
Dimitrios Konstantinidis (view profile)
Hello Yair,
Has print2eps been tested with R2015b? It seems that the font mapping doesn't work.
I have a figure with Times font throughout (roman and bold). I made an eps using print2eps, but when I imported this in MS Word and tried to create a PDF file, I get a message like:
%%[ Error: Times-Roman-Bold not found. Font cannot be embedded. ]%%
%%[ Error: invalidfont; OffendingCommand: findfont ]%%
Stack:
/Font
/Times-Roman-Bold
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%
Thanks
Scott Williams (view profile)
By the way the 1 star rating was an accident. I rate this file 6/5.
Scott Williams (view profile)
I have also noticed greek letters distorted when using export_fig. I used to export as -png with compression -m3.
Exporting to pdf file removes the greek letters problem, and increases the quality of the plot.
William (view profile)
I use this all the time to create plots, and it has been great! Recently I've noticed it does not create Greek letters correctly in the title. There is another post on Github noting the same problem for Matlab 2015a. I'm using Matlab 2014b on Windows 7. Does anyone know why this is happening or how to fix it?
Thanks for the help!
xinlu wang (view profile)
Keegan Moore (view profile)
cheng joylin (view profile)
cheng joylin (view profile)
David MERCIER (view profile)
David MERCIER (view profile)
Jitin Beri (view profile)
Al (view profile)
Hi
This is working great for me with exception of using it with the function Magnify on Figure. http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/26007-on-figure-magnifier
For some reason, when Export_Fig runs, the x-axis of some of the magnified figures changes to become illegible. Its almost like some additional decimal places are added to the x-axis and they all overlap each other. As soon as Export_Fig is done, the axis goes back to normal.
Any help on this would be appreciated.
VItor ribeiro (view profile)
This is my favorite tool to export graphics. However i found that i am not able to export markers that have a certain amount of alpha parameter(yes i found a way to do it and maybe you can find it if you dig on internet). When i export to eps the effect of shade in the background of the marker disappear. The way that i can set transparency in markers is the following:
sMarkers=h1.MarkerHandle; %h1 is line handle
sMarkers.FaceColorData = uint8(255*[0;0;0;0.5]); %fourth element allows setting alpha
sMarkers.EdgeColorData = uint8(255*[0;0;0;0]);
mashtine (view profile)
Hi there,
This is a great code but I cannot seem to understand that when I try to use export_fig with larger font sizes, a grey box appears over my axis labels when I try to export the figure in a higher resolution. This is slowly driving me insane and I cannot seem to find anything on it. Perhaps it is my graphics card? Or just me? I use something like this for instance:
export_fig 'filename.png' -png -opengl -r150;
Hassan Naseri (view profile)
It's an amazing tool.
Thanks for maintaining to support 2014 and 2015 MATLAB versions.
Vasilis Kapetanidis (view profile)
Chenming Zhang (view profile)
I am wondering why the font is extremely small under linux? I have tried both gentoo and ubuntu, the problem persists. matlab version also have been tested but all ends up with very small fonts.
Thanks
Deniz (view profile)
Lavanya (view profile)
Hi.. Actually i used this code last year to save fig as pdf and append the same, and it worked great..
but now when I try to use 'append', unwanted patches appear on the appended pdf file. I am using MATLAB 2014b. Will you be able to help me out.??
otherwise, the code works great.!! superb job!!
Stephane (view profile)
Vital !!
Thank you very much !
Jens Keienburg (view profile)
Solves all my issues with Matlab - LaTeX compatibility.
Ilya Belevich (view profile)
awesome!
Alan Cole (view profile)
FYI. For my comment on May 13th I corrected the issue by temporarily turning of Windows 7 UAC. When set to none it worked correctly.
John (view profile)
John (view profile)
R2015a, Mac Pro, Mavericks. Exporting to PNG. Works great, fixed my sizing and clipping problems.
Alan Cole (view profile)
With the new version I receive the following error:
Warning: Path to ghostscript installation could not be saved. Enter it manually in C:\Program
Files\MATLAB\altmany-export_fig-b32040d\.ignore\ghostscript.txt.
The \.ignore\ghostscript.txt does not currently exist.
Peng Xu (view profile)
Great tool
Gabriel Droulers (view profile)
I have a problem with the exported .png file. The exponential notation on the top of the left Y axis does not show in the png exported image. Has anyone experienced this?
For instance I have a plot with value 0 to 5 "x10^-12". The exponential shows at the top of the axis but none of the formats I have tried (eps, pdf, jpg, png) show it.
Otherwise, nice work!
Ludwig (view profile)
I have used this tool in matlab 2013a and it works perfectly. In matlab 2015a, the exact code gives a issue with exporting imagesc figures with colorbars. It always displays a white diagonal stripe from botton left to bottom left to top right. This occurs no matter which colormap is used. Has anyone tried it on 2015a so far?
ps : excellent work
Ignacio Lucas Avila Mangano (view profile)
It works excellent for me.
Kevin Moerman (view profile)
Nicholas D. (view profile)
Zulkifli Hidayat (view profile)
Menno Poot (view profile)
A great utility to export my figures to high quality .eps files.
biajia (view profile)
When exporting Matlab2015a ".fig" file to ".pdf", the edges are cut off, especially the right side.
Sergei P. (view profile)
simbaforrest (view profile)
Jeff (view profile)
Hi
I'm having trouble with matlab 2015a
Below is my error message
Thanks for your help
Error using eps2pdf (line 107)
Error: /undefined in bdef
Operand stack:
dom --nostringval--
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval--
--nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push 1983 1 3 %oparray_pop 1982 1 3 %oparray_pop 1966 1 3 %oparray_pop 1852 1
3 %oparray_pop --nostringval-- %errorexec_pop .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push
--nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1201/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:77/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Current file position is 64
GPL Ghostscript 9.15: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
Error in export_fig (line 433)
eps2pdf(tmp_nam, pdf_nam, 1, options.append, options.colourspace==2, options.quality);
Lei Ding (view profile)
Hussein Sahli (view profile)
atron (view profile)
Converting a figure with non-standard screen size to pdf on Unix fails
-----------------------------------------
I am trying to convert figures with non-default screen sizes into pdfs:
% open matlab figure file
h=openfig_default(fig_file_name);
% change figure size to non-default size
set(h,'units','normalized','outerposition',[0.1 0.1 0.5 0.5]);
% convert fig file to pdf
export_fig('out.pdf','-pdf', h, '-nocrop','-transparent','-painters', '-append');
This works nicely on Windows, but on Unix the figures in the pdf all have the same default size. Any ideas?
Nicole Rüger (view profile)
great, but i have a problem.
ich will append a few pdfs.
this pdfs have variable filesnames und paths. I got follow error:
Error: /undefinedfilename in (Auswertung_24-Mar-2015\\-2.2-\\2.2_Extraktionsgte.pdf)
Operand stack:
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1191/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:1/20(G)-- --dict:77/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: No such file or directory
GPL Ghostscript 9.15: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
thanks for help
comm@ZeoN (view profile)
Serves the purpose very well. Thanks!
Sagar (view profile)
I found the answer to my earlier question:
export_fig('exportfig_painters.png', '-png', '-painters', '-r300');
It works fine.
Sagar (view profile)
Hi,
I had used this program successfully in the past for printing figures made in matlab. But now I am having a problem. I am trying to print a high resolution map made using geoshow in matlab mapping toolbox. But when I execute the command say export_fig finename.png -r600, the file is saved but only the axis labels are printed, and not the whole figure. I can still print several other figures successfully, so the problem must be related to the mapping toolbox. Could you please help?
Thank you very much.
-Sagar
Bob (view profile)
Helped a lot, thanks!
Yair Altman (view profile)
@Aniket - yes, export_fig does indeed accepts a handle to a figure/axes/uipanel
To all the others - you need to report the issue in the GitHub, otherwise they will not be tracked or fixed: https://github.com/altmany/export_fig/issues
Before submitting a new issue, please verify that it was not previously reported.
Jean (view profile)
Hello,
I have the same issue as James Rankin in Matlab 2014b:
Error using eps2pdf (line 107)
Error: /rangecheck in definefont
Operand stack:
CMMI10 --dict:14/15(L)-- Font
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval--
--nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval--
--nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push
1951 1 3 %oparray_pop 1950 1 3 %oparray_pop
--nostringval-- 1934 1 3 %oparray_pop 1820 1 3
%oparray_pop --nostringval-- %errorexec_pop .runexec2
--nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2
%stopped_push --nostringval-- 1901 2 3 %oparray_pop
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1188/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:121/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: Invalid argument
Current file position is 90501
GPL Ghostscript 9.15: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
Error in export_fig (line 442)
eps2pdf(tmp_nam, pdf_nam, 1, options.append,
options.colourspace==2, options.quality);
Error in fit_ramsey (line 210)
export_fig(['fit_' filename], '-pdf');
Unfortunately, his fix is not working for me... It was working well with 2012b, I don't understand, as I am working with standard fonts...
Anyway, great soft, very usefull for scientific works !
Aniket Vagha (view profile)
Brilliant tool! Image quality in pdfs is really good.
I was wondering if in case of multiple figures, could we use figure handles when using export_fig?
Sauro Salomoni (view profile)
Elizabeth Jones (view profile)
Great code! It worked without any fiddling in R2014b and created high-quality PDFs that I can use for professional presentations, posters, and publications. Thanks a lot for making and maintaining this code.
Durga Lal Shrestha (view profile)
I have the legend at the Southoutside with horizontal orientation. When the box of the legend is set to 'off', a little bit bottom part of the legend is also cropped when exporting figure to eps and pdf (no problem with png). There is a no problem with box outline. The problem persists in MATLAB R2014b.
Does anyone else have similar issue?
Thanks.
Kai Shi (view profile)
I added a rectangle box in the figure and change the transparency of the box to 0.3. However, when I export the figure into latex. The transparency of the box is still 100%. With and without the -transparent option shows the same results. The code of generating the box is shown below:
annotation(hCCs,'rectangle',rectSize,...
'FaceColor','r','FaceAlpha',0.3,...
'LineStyle','none');
Javier Paredes (view profile)
Thank you for this library, it is really usefull! Unfortunately, I am having serious issues with export_fig, specifically with the fileparts(tempname) portion of the code that specifies a temporary folder that the program uses to create/delete temp images. It is trying to use the system32 folder for one of our users and it is giving him access violation errors and crashing. I would like to be able to specify my own user specified temporary path on his computer that he does have read/write access to. This is not a capability of the tool out of the box but could be a simple optional addition that would save us a lot of grief. For now, I will have to do this myself on my export_fig copy. Thanks!
Tero (view profile)
Tero (view profile)
Erik (view profile)
James Rankin (view profile)
I was receiving the following error after upgrading to Matlab 2014b (in Ubuntu 14.04):
------------------------------------------
Error using eps2pdf (line 107)
Error: /rangecheck in /findfont
...
Error in export_fig (line 442)
eps2pdf(tmp_nam, pdf_nam, 1, options.append, options.colourspace==2, options.quality);
-----------------------------------------
I fixed this by commenting the following lines in eps2pdf
fp = font_path();
if ~isempty(fp)
options = [options ' -sFONTPATH="' fp '"'];
end
Yiqun Yang (view profile)
To be more specific, here is the example code.
figure(1)
plot(1:100,1:100)
xlabel('Frequency (Hz)')
ylabel('attenuation (Neper/m)')
set(gca,'fontsize',16)
export_fig test -pdf -transparent
Yiqun Yang (view profile)
Hi,
First thanks a lot for providing such a wonderful toolbox!
However, here I've found a bug when I switch to Matlab 2014b. In Matlab R2014b, when I was using the toolbox to generate pdf figure as:
export_fig ConvEstimateatten -pdf -transparent
The margin of the figure is not cropped as desiered. Could you have a look at it?
Thanks!
Tintin Milou (view profile)
Hi,
I've got another issue: How can I save the file in a different subfolder. I created a subfolder Fig and then, tried:
export_fig ../Fig/fig.pdf;
but that gave
Error using eps2pdf (line 107)
GPL Ghostscript 9.10: **** Could not open the file ../Fig/fig.pdf .
**** Unable to open the initial device, quitting.
Error in export_fig (line 442)
eps2pdf(tmp_nam, pdf_nam, 1, options.append, options.colourspace==2, options.quality);
What am I doing wrong?
Tintin Milou (view profile)
Hi,
I'm still a bit puzzled how to display tex symbols. For instance, one of my titles is
title('\pi^w')
and is properly displayed in the figure, but not the printed pdf (there, I get a colon to the power of w). I'm using the latest version of texshop 3.49.
Thanks!
Martin (view profile)
To clarify, I'm trying to export a plot with a legend from a GUI axis using export_fig(handles.myaxis, filename). The legend does not show. If I plot with a legend from the command window and save the figure with export_fig the legend shows correctly.
Martin (view profile)
Excellent function!
However, using 2014b, the legends disappear from my plots. This does not happen with 2014a. Is there a workaround or missing argument for 2014b?
Yair Altman (view profile)
@Ian Zammit - the utility's changelog is listed at the bottom of this webpage.
@Linh, Ruben, Iain - please create corresponding issues in Github (check if the issue already exists there, before posting a new one). I have just received ownership of export_fig's maintenance and it could take me some time to dive into things and be able to fix them, so please be patient.
@Ragheb - try to update your ghostscript executable to the latest version. Perhaps your existing executable is incompatible with your platform and causes this crash.
Bart Boesman (view profile)
Linh Nguyen (view profile)
Excellent tool! Thank you a lot. It works for most cases for me, except when I need to plot and export a big field (200x300, pcolor). Could anyone try and tell me why I cant get a resolved image please? Results I got is also in the folder:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/41yxaivtfkf8uzn/AABm-AMXI-0zTGedz8IgMPb9a?dl=0
Ruben Luis (view profile)
Brilliant contribution!
However, it seems that something significant has changed when using R2014b. It does not seem to be possible to reduce the thickness of axis borders. Can you advise a workaround?
Ben Puttnam (view profile)
Ehsan (view profile)
Very very helpful, and easy to use.
Ragheb (view profile)
Hi
export_fig works perfectly for small figures when I use this command: "export_fig test.pdf". However, using the same command, Matlab crashes for large figures and it gives me this error:
Exception type: Bus Error (0xa) at pc=7fff887be082
Also, I tried export_fig test.eps, but it does not even work?
Many thanks
Ragheb
Ragheb (view profile)
Hi
export_fig works perfectly for small figures when I use this command: "export_fig test.pdf". However, using the same command, Matlab crashes for large figures and it gives me this error:
Exception type: Bus Error (0xa) at pc=7fff887be082
Also, I tried export_fig test.eps, but it does not even work?
Many thanks
Ragheb
photoinduced (view profile)
from my experience works perfectly! Is there a list of changes for the version uploaded 08/12/14? The one within export_fig and some other .m files seems not to be updated
Iain (view profile)
Hi Oliver,
Thanks for an excellent function!
I am using a current version of export_fig (today), OS X 10.10.1, ghostscript 9.15, and Matlab 2014b. All works fine when I set up a figure and run:
export_fig(fname,'-pdf',fh);
However, if I then run:
>> set(groot,'Units','normalized')
I now get:
>> export_fig(fname,'-pdf',fh);
Error using eps2pdf (line 107)
Error: /configurationerror in --setpagedevice--
Additional information: [/PageSize [0 0]]
Operand stack:
--nostringval-- (%%BoundingBox: 0 0 0 0) --dict:1/2(ro)(G)-- --nostringval--
--nostringval-- (%%BoundingBox: 0 0 0 0) 1 0 0 false --dict:1/1(L)--
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2
%stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push
1951 1 3 %oparray_pop 1950 1 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval-- 1934 1 3
%oparray_pop 1820 1 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval-- %errorexec_pop .runexec2
--nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval--
%ztokenexec_continue (scanner state) --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval--
--nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 1913 10 3 %oparray_pop
--nostringval-- --nostringval-- --dict:1/10(L)-- --nostringval-- 16 %dict_continue
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1189/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:81/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: Invalid argument
Current file position is 266
GPL Ghostscript 9.15: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
Error in export_fig (line 442)
eps2pdf(tmp_nam, pdf_nam, 1, options.append, options.colourspace==2, options.quality);
The output is now a blank PDF. Clearly, I can work around this by not invoking:
>> set(groot,'Units','normalized')
That said, it would be nice to have export_fig resilient to this setting.
cheers
Iain
Jiri (view profile)
Panayiotis Christodoulies (view profile)
Great tool!
Steven (view profile)
Hi Oliver. Sorry. I have not heard about GitHub before. Otherwise I would not bother you asking here.
I created an issue.
Thank you.
Steven
David Nolan (view profile)
Great function and badly needed for HQ figures for publishing. You have my thanks Oliver.
Valjean (view profile)
Sorry, never heard of GitHub. Now I see it at over there above the Download Zip button. Not familiar with it.
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
Philipp: There is absolutely no chance without an issue raised on GitHub.
usr0815 (view profile)
Is there any chance that there will be a fix for the totally "jagged" lines all along a graph when exporting to either of those formats: png, eps, pdf, ... ??
The strange thing is: if I use saveas PNG, the Problem is not occuring. With export_fig (PNG) is occurs. So I suppose export_fig first creates a vector format and afterwards a PNG of it, which can explain that.
Anyway: I need MATLAB 2014b for some other features and ask myself if there is any chance to get this bug fixed?
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
Valjean, R2D2: For the 100th time (and beginning to wonder what is wrong with people), I do not address issues placed in the comments. If you want me to look at your problem, raise a GitHub issue and we can talk.
Valjean (view profile)
Update: export_fig works fine on the screen-sized figures when I remove the
'-transparent' argument.
Valjean (view profile)
I want to clarify my previous comment. The script worked for the normal-sized figures, but the one that it choked on was the size of the screen if that makes any difference or helps diagnose the problem.
I create the figure, then resize the figure using the following lines of code:
h=figure;
set(h, 'Position', get(0,'ScreenSize'));
The figures that did save successfully were those that had not been resized.
Any thoughts?
Valjean (view profile)
Thank you for this script, Oliver. I've been using it successfully for the past few years. However, I recently upgraded from MATLAB 2009 to 2012b, and I'm having nothing but problems. First, I had the same error that Derek got (posted 07 Jun 2013). So, I downloaded the latest version just now and re-ran. Now, I am getting the following error:
Array dimensions must match for binary array op.
Error in export_fig (line 283)
alpha = round(sum(B - A, 3)) / (255 * 3) + 1;
Error in SavePlotsFnc (line 3)
export_fig(strcat(dirname,'\',sn,fname,'.png'),'-png','-transparent',figh);
Please help!
R2D2 (view profile)
I placed the wrong error message in the previous post. The message I get with GS 9.10 is:
Error using eps2pdf (line 107)
Error: /undefined in bdef
Operand stack:
dom --nostringval--
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval--
2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false
1 %stopped_push 1900 1 3 %oparray_pop 1899 1 3 %oparray_pop
1883 1 3 %oparray_pop 1771 1 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval--
%errorexec_pop .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval--
2 %stopped_push --nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1177/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:77/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: Invalid argument
Current file position is 64
GPL Ghostscript 9.10: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
R2D2 (view profile)
@Oliver. Tried ghostscript 9.10 and 9.15. Neither worked. Currently getting an error message:
Error: File: ghostscript.m Line: 35 Column: 1
Function definitions are not permitted in this
context.
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
Steven: Sorry I have to repeat myself again. I don't know, and I won't look into it until you raise a GitHub issue. Thanks.
Steven (view profile)
Thanks for the great function. Sorry I have to mention my question again.
Why does the function can not save figures, in log-log plot correctly, when the range is too small? (It prints the true value instead of 10^...)
Thank you in advance.
Steven
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
R2D2: Unfortunately I can't fix bugs in either Yosemite or Ghostscript. However, if you install Ghostscript 9.10 from here:
http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/Ghostscript-9.10.pkg
does that fix things for you?
R2D2 (view profile)
Please fix the bugs that prevent this package from working with Mac OS X Yosemite + Matlab R2014b!
Thanks.
Bob (view profile)
update for mac users: I may have found the issue. If you have texshop installed make sure you are at version 3.44. I updated ghostscript separately and had problems, I updated texshop and voila, export_fig appears to work as before. Speculation: the texshop installer does something the separate ghostscript package didn’t.
Bob (view profile)
Has anyone gotten pdf export to work on yosemite/2014b? I’m using Ghostscript 9.15. I would appreciate anything your working setup. Thanks.
Yuewu (view profile)
h1u1k1 (view profile)
As noted earlier, this really nice function does not work with matlab2014b on MacOS (Yosemite) 10.10.
h1u1k1 (view profile)
Indranil (view profile)
how can I use this one to save multiple files?
BERDIN (view profile)
Carl Wouters (view profile)
Really nice !
Only one thing missing: SVG
Would love a real SVG creator.
Rafael Madrid (view profile)
Martin (view profile)
Thank you for this great function! Just one question: even when I use the -native option the final resolution of the image is different than the size of the matrix that has gone into the image. E.g., I have a 2048x2048 image, but after using export_fig (with the -native option) it returns a 2052x2052 image [currently using '-m4 -bmp -native' as options]. If I don't use that option it returns a 3176x3176 image.
Do you have a suggestion as how to get the exported image to match the size of the matrix?
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
Michael, Adam: Surely one of you can (a) read and (b) file an issue on the github page, to which I will respond. I can't help you with what you've provided. Thanks.
Michael (view profile)
With a code perfectly working on OS 10.9.5 and Matlab 2014a, I got the exact same issue than Adam, but on a OS X 10.10 (final release!) with Matlab 2014b and Ghostscript 9.15...
Please find something ;-)
Error using eps2pdf (line 107)
Error: /undefined in definefont
Operand stack:
CMSY10 --dict:14/15(L)-- Font
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1
%stopped_push 1951 1 3 %oparray_pop 1950 1 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval-- 1934 1 3 %oparray_pop 1820 1 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval--
%errorexec_pop .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- 1901 2 3 %oparray_pop
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1188/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:121/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: Invalid argument
Current file position is 71195
GPL Ghostscript 9.15: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
Error in export_fig (line 435)
eps2pdf(tmp_nam, pdf_nam, 1, options.append, options.colourspace==2, options.quality);
Steven (view profile)
The function is magnificent.
Except that sometimes for me a problem arises when exporting!
In loglog plot, the label ticks are not written correctly, I mean they should be something like 10^(2), but they are 100.
Strange is that this only happens for y-axis and x-axis is fine!
I looked it up a lot in the internet, but could not find the solution. I have not been able to resolve it by changing tickmode to manual or etc.
Any other solution?
Thanks!
Steven
George (view profile)
Peter Pablo (view profile)
Eric (view profile)
Thanks a lot for the great work
Christian (view profile)
I encountered a similar issue as described by Emma. However, it works fine for linewidths>0.75 pt, but for smaller linewidths the lines seem to be set to 0.75 pt when exporting, i.e. when exporting lines of 0.5 pt width (or any value<0.75), it will export them as 0.75 pt, when exporting lines with 1 pt width (or any value >0.75 pt) it exports them with the correct width.
The problem does not occur in R2014a.
Adam (view profile)
Tremendously useful function. However, I seem to have issues getting it work in 2014b on Mac OS X Mavericks (10.9.5). Since upgrading I get the following error whenever I export to eps:
Error using eps2pdf (line 107)
Error: /typecheck in /findfont
Operand stack:
CMMI10
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval--
--nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval--
--nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push 1916 1 3 %oparray_pop
1915 1 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval-- 1899 1 3
%oparray_pop 1787 1 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval--
%errorexec_pop .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval--
--nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- 1868 1 3
%oparray_pop
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1184/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:121/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: Invalid argument
Current file position is 90356
GPL Ghostscript 9.10: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
Error in export_fig (line 435)
eps2pdf(tmp_nam, pdf_nam, 1, options.append, options.colourspace==2,
options.quality);
It seems to be an issue with ghostscript, but any hints as to how to fix it would be gratefully received!
Thanks!
Emma (view profile)
I absolutely love this tool, but I have a problem using 2014b. The lines on my exported figures are really wide now. The exact same code run in 2014a is perfect, but the new linewidths are unusable.
Fabian Schrumpf (view profile)
Oliver: I accidentally did not use the most recent release of your script. After updating, it works as great as before in 2014b as well. Thank you.
Yisheng Xu (view profile)
It's a great tool. The only flaw that I found is the LineWidth and FontSize of exported vector image (pdf) is slighlty bigger than the sizes specified in MATLAB (e.g., LineWidth becomes 0.735pt and unadjustable; FontSize of 10pt becomes 10.29pt) Any way to fix it? Thanks!
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
Fabian: R2014b works for me. If you have a reproducible error I suggest you provide me the code in an issue on github.
Fabian Schrumpf (view profile)
I love this function and use it almost daily to export Matlab figures to pdf and postprocess them in other programs.
However, in Matlab 2014b Mathworks introduced the new graph design and the export to pdf/eps is not possible anymore, giving the error:
Error using eps2pdf (line 100)
Error: /undefined in bdef
Operand stack:
dom --nostringval--
I would highly appreciate if this could be fixed to run with the most recent Matlab version.
Fabian Schrumpf (view profile)
Malte (view profile)
Great job, thanks! However I am faced with the following problem... I used "patch" for plotting and the "FaceAlpha" property. After the export the background is black (*.png, transparent, opengl). Any ideas???
ustc (view profile)
it's very good!
Micke Malmström (view profile)
Robert Richardson (view profile)
Robert Richardson (view profile)
M S (view profile)
Love this function. Transparency in .pdf/.eps would be *hugely* appreciated, I still use plot2svg when trying to save images with patch transparency.
Fei yang (view profile)
Pretty good!
Ander Biguri (view profile)
This fileexchange should DEFINITELY be added to matlab as a feature. Amazing.
Tobias Benjamin Gram (view profile)
Vladimir (view profile)
Liang Haixiao (view profile)
Juan Deaton (view profile)
mf0000 (view profile)
This looks as a function I might as well quickly fall in love with. However, I am in troubles with how to make it work. I do not find it so straightforward how to install Xpdf on mac, OS X. Can anyone help me with step-by-step instructions on proper installation commands in the terminal?
Karen (view profile)
Selecting the location for the system version of ghostscript did not work for me. I am using matlab 2014a on a mac (10.9.4). My ghoscript installation is via MacPorts, and installs in /opt/local/bin/gs. My default shell is csh, not bash.
I was able to get the ghostscript.m script to work by changing the mac-specific 'export DYLIB...' commands (bash syntax) to 'setenv DYLIB....' (csh syntax).
I did not find an easy way to check what shell the user is using, but perhaps some checking for this could be added. Since the fix requiring the environment variable to be set has been around for about a year in your code, I suspect not many users have csh as their default shell, either under unix or OSX systems.
I have been using export_fig for several years, and am glad to have it back with my new laptop.
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
Arnold: Try using imsc from my sc package. It doesn't use patch objects, but can still fill in NaNs with any colour you want.
arnold (view profile)
I use imagescnan quite a bit. However, I can't export those figures as pdf since the white patches masking the nan areas are always dropped when using export_fig. I can't seemt to find a way to keep the patches. Exporting using standard pdf export works fine in this regard, yet it's very clumsy.... that's why export_fig is always first :)
Brad Carman (view profile)
plot with transparency in the patches not rendering in pdf correctly (the patches are given a solid color). How can this be fixed?
Haowen (view profile)
arnold (view profile)
Hi Oliver, still having problems exporting patches and lines or symbol.
I can use uistack or uistack2 from the file exchange here and get good looking results BUT, if I export PDF using export_fig the patch is always in front of everything else. Maybe you can look into that and fix it! thanks Arnold.
Mei June (view profile)
Is there a way to use this great tool in the editor's publish function?
So that pressing the publish button yields a report with images and graphs as specified with parameters in this export_fig tool?
jianfeng zeng (view profile)
I don't know how to set the DPI and size of figure
outputted by export_fig. Could any friend tell me about it? thanks very much!!!
Noah Levine-Small (view profile)
Export_fig has been a life saver. Unfortunately, I now get the following error:
Error using eps2pdf (line 107)
Error: /undefined in bdef
Operand stack:
dom --nostringval--
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval--
--nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval--
--nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push 1932 1 3
%oparray_pop 1931 1 3 %oparray_pop 1915 1 3
%oparray_pop 1803 1 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval--
%errorexec_pop .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval--
--nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1189/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:77/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Current file position is 64
GPL Ghostscript 9.09: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
Error in export_fig (line 424)
eps2pdf(tmp_nam, pdf_nam, 1, options.append,
options.colourspace==2, options.quality);
any ideas?
Junghwan (view profile)
Many thanks to Oliver for the great code.
One issue that I encountered:
When exported in eps format, all my tweaks on the plot legend are reset to default.
Baptiste (view profile)
Tristan (view profile)
Thanks for the great code, and the ghostscript error fix! it suddenly didn't print eps or pdf anymore, but now works beautifully again
..Afif: export_fig(gcf,'filename','-eps')
Sven (view profile)
Hello,
Thanks a lot for that beatiful code. Works quite good.
However, there is a bug: one cannot use the symbol "%" within the file name:
When I type: export_fig(f3, 'Post-Process Estimates - diff. weight (+5 +10 +15)kg, Amp 10','-pdf','-q0','-a1','-r160','-nocrop') % lowest quality, no anti-aliasing, reduced resolution
it creates a nice pdf.
However when I add the symbol "%" at the end of the name, that is: Amp 10% I get a strange error message:
>> export_fig(f3, 'Post-Process Estimates - diff. weight (+5 +10 +15)kg, Amp 10%','-pdf','-q0','-a1','-r160','-nocrop')
Error using eps2pdf (line 107)
**** Unable to open the initial device, quitting.
Error in export_fig (line 435)
eps2pdf(tmp_nam, pdf_nam, 1, options.append, options.colourspace==2, options.quality);
A bug?
Afif (view profile)
Can someone please provide an minimalist example of how to export and .eps image using 'export_fi'? I am having a really hard time using it. Thanks in advance.
Tobias Benjamin Gram (view profile)
After updating to R2014b, the crop function for PDF seems not to work properly. This is my test code:
--------------------------------------
x = -100:0.01:100;y = -3.*x.^2-3.*x+4;
figure,plot(x,y,'--')
xlabel('x-axis'),ylabel('y-axis'),title('title'),legend('function')
export_fig('fig1_q101_painters','-pdf','-q101','-painters');
export_fig('fig2_painters','-pdf','-painters');
export_fig('fig3_pdf','-pdf');
export_fig('fig4_nocrop','-pdf','-nocrop');
export_fig('fig5_png','-png');
export_fig('fig6_bmp','-bmp');
export_fig('fig7_jpg','-jpg');
----------------------------------------------
The png, bmp and jpg is being crop perfect.
Bennet Luck (view profile)
Most used function at the moment, great!
Preetham Manjunatha (view profile)
Extremely useful function!
murat (view profile)
Hugo Mendonça (view profile)
Morteza Shahpari (view profile)
Morteza Shahpari (view profile)
Dirk kok (view profile)
If you are writing documents which require matlab figures this is a must have program.
Richard (view profile)
First of all, this program is totally awesome. But... I'm having a problem with R2014b running on Windows 7. After creating a very simple plot, I get this error information.
Error: /undefined in bdef
Operand stack:
dom --nostringval--
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push 1862 1 3 %oparray_pop 1861 1 3 %oparray_pop 1845 1 3 %oparray_pop 1739 1 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval-- %errorexec_pop .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1153/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:69/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Current file position is 64
GPL Ghostscript 8.64: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
I'm also confused as to why it's using Ghostscript 8.64, as I've installed 9.14 and changed 'path_ = user_string('ghostscript');' in ghostscript.m to 'path_ = user_string('C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.14\bin\gswin64c.exe');'.
talha (view profile)
Debejyo Chakraborty (view profile)
Actually exports vector pdf, cropped accurately! Thanks for this. Saves me a ton of time.
daniel (view profile)
Wow, what a great tool! Saved me a lot of trouble, Thanks!!!!
Hassan Naseri (view profile)
Great new version. Finally the problem with interactive plots, e.g., "impoint" or "impoly", has been resolved. :)
Christoph Gugg (view profile)
great, now works with the prerelease of R2014b on OSX 10.9.3
Jorge (view profile)
Alexander (view profile)
Yifan (view profile)
Yifan (view profile)
George (view profile)
Exactly what I needed. It actually gave me an eureka experience in my work. Thank you so much.
IRIN SAJAN (view profile)
awesome...!!!!:)
Seyed F Yousefian (view profile)
Awesome! This is exactly what I have been looking for.
mitilma (view profile)
great! this saves my day, thank you!
Wang (view profile)
Rashmil Dahanayake (view profile)
Figured it out.
file_name=sprintf('plot_%d',x);
export_fig(fullfile(file_name),gcf, '-m2.5');
Rashmil Dahanayake (view profile)
I'm try to use this script to automatically plot all columns saved in an array. Say if I have a 3x2000 matrix, I want to plot 3 raw vectors and save plot_1.png, plot_2.png and plot_3 png. Can I pass a string variable export_fig.
code:
% auto plotter
t=0:.001:2;
y1=2*sin(2*pi*t);
y3=2/3*sin(2*pi*3*t);
y5=2/5*sin(2*pi*5*t);
Y=[y1;y3;y5];
% real code begins here
n=size(Y,1);
for x=1:n;
taggy=sprintf('C=%d mF',x); % title
file_name= sprintf('plot_%d.png',x); % file name to be plot_x.png
plot(t, Y(1,:));title(taggy);
export_fig file_name -m2.5;close(gcf);
end
yun (view profile)
jACK bROUDY (view profile)
export_fig Exports figures nicely to a number of vector & bitmap formats.
Ahmed (view profile)
Wesley Allen (view profile)
cfwen (view profile)
awesome!
Cecilia (view profile)
fei YANG (view profile)
FF Lee (view profile)
I must say that this is the best MATLAB code I ever use. It works even on my old version (7.0.4 R14) MATLAB. Many thanks to the author. :)
FF Lee (view profile)
FF Lee (view profile)
Erik (view profile)
Finally a comprehensive figure exporting tool for MATLAB. I gratefully use it to create hi-res vectors from my figures, which is something that is not easily done in a useful fashion.
Erik (view profile)
Finally a comprehensive figure exporting tool for MATLAB. I gratefully use it to create hi-res vectors from my figures, which is something that is not easily done in a useful fashion.
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
I repeat, please email me bug reports rather than posting them here. Better still, fork the repository, fix the bug, and create a pull request.
Hassan: Your example worked as expected on my system.
Alvaro: Feel free to email me a minimal working example.
Hassan Naseri (view profile)
1. Thank you for the great tool which I use it for all my graphic exports.
2. A problem: If a plot contains an "impoint" or "impoly", or probably any of these interactive objects from image processing toolbox, the output of export_fig simply doesn't show them. The problem happens only when exporting an axes not the whole figure. I would very much appreciate any suggestion?
figure()
handle = subplot(1,2,1);
impoly(handle, [1 1; 2 2; 1 2])
export_fig('test.pdf', '-pdf', '-transparent', handle)
Alvaro (view profile)
Great tool, thanks for it !
I'm having the following error passing uipanel to export_fig
The name 'OuterPosition' is not an accessible property for an instance of class 'uipanel'. (im using matlab 8.1)
Matt (view profile)
Aidan (view profile)
Quan (view profile)
Samuel Macedo (view profile)
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
Jo: Many thanks for the bug report. However, I do ask (in the description above) that people email me bug reports, rather than post them here.
Jo (view profile)
First of all: great tool! I'm using it a lot.
Second: Matlab FileExchange Commenting is driving me nutts :-) (should've peeked into the previous comment)
Third: (main reason for my post) I encountered a tiny bug in the script, appearing as follows:
1. Create a figure
2. Create multiple axes inside
3. Draw imagesc in each axis
4. Disable axis labelling (axis off)
5. Draw e.g. a coloured rectangle in each image
=> The export will show the rectangle black in all but the first axis
Minimal example:
figure;
set(gcf,'Position',[0 0 1000 500]);
axes('position',[0.0 0.0 0.5 1]);
imagesc(rand(24,24));
axis off
rectangle('position',[8 8 8 8],'EdgeColor','r','LineWidth',2);
axes('position',[0.5 0.0 0.5 1]);
imagesc(rand(24,24));
axis off
rectangle('position',[8 8 8 8],'EdgeColor','r','LineWidth',2);
colormap gray
export_fig('tmp.pdf','-pdf');
Best wishes and thanks in advance for any hints or clues!
Jo (view profile)
Arg, this commenting interface in FileExchange is driving me nutts... forgot to remove a .*m in both imagesc... sry for that :)
Jo (view profile)
Jo (view profile)
Martin (view profile)
Pooya89 (view profile)
Aaron True (view profile)
Sorry for the multiple posts, apparently I can't rate it then comment without it automatically submitting my rating.
Anyways, love it so far, thank you!
I'm trying to resolve 2 odd issues. First, the negative signs on my axes tick labels show up as empty boxes when I open the pdf in Adobe Reader, which makes me think there is a missing font package etc. in my Adobe install; however, when I open the pdf in Ghostscript there is no symbol at all (minus sign or empty box), just the number on each axis tick. I'm using Adobe Reader XI which came installed on a new Dell PC (< 6 mos. old), and I just downloaded Ghostscript 9.10 today.
Second issue is that when I export as a png or tiff the code seems to shift text boxes around; i.e. my axis labels and an additional text box I added to the figure are in different locations than I explicitly set in the code and how they appear in the MATLAB figure (R2011a Student Version).
Any leads or similar issues? Thanks in advance.
Aaron True (view profile)
Jesper (view profile)
maryam (view profile)
She (view profile)
Solve my problem puzzled me for a long time, because I can't print *.jpeg files as the figures, and I used to copy *.fig files to another Windows computer to finish printing wanted picutres.
When I get this function, Matlab under Linux is becoming more amazing!
Thank you very much!
Sid (view profile)
Manuel (view profile)
Robert McHugh (view profile)
Austin Fite (view profile)
The output is beautiful, thank you very much for taking the time to make this.
Sean (view profile)
Chuntao Dan (view profile)
Must-have for everyone! Superb figure quality! For Mac users, ghostscript can be installed as a component of the MacTeX-Additions package at http://tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html.
Jamie Guggenheim (view profile)
Alberto González Olmos (view profile)
ANAND SARIT (view profile)
pdftops.exe is not running on my system. i have a windows 8 operating system... someone please help..
Lars (view profile)
This is a great function!
After changing to another linux mint 15 (MATE) from Fedora 18 I get the error message bellow. Do anyone of you have an idea of how to fix it? I tried the fix of Jannik from June 26 2013 without any luck...
Error using eps2pdf (line 107)
Error: /undefined in /findfont
Operand stack:
120 Helvetica ISOLatin1Encoding Helvetica Helvetica
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval--
--nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push 1916 1 3 %oparray_pop 1915 1 3 %oparray_pop
--nostringval-- 1899 1 3 %oparray_pop 1787 1 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval-- %errorexec_pop .runexec2
--nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 1868
5 5 %oparray_pop
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1179/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:82/200(L)-- --dict:97/160(L)-- --dict:8/95(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Current file position is 7052
GPL Ghostscript 9.07: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
Error in export_fig (line 406)
eps2pdf(tmp_nam, pdf_nam, 1, options.append, options.colourspace==2, options.quality);
Lars (view profile)
Joris Kampman (view profile)
After having some troubles in Linux Matlab to create nice figures for Libreoffice, this tooling works perfectly!
thumbs up!
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
Jonne: There is no known issue with thick lines. For example,
>> plot(rand(3), 'LineWidth', 4);
>> export_fig test -png -pdf
works as expected on my PC.
Jonne (view profile)
Thank you for this function. I use it alot.
Currently I am trying to use it for an plot which contains line plots with 'LineWidth'> 2. The problem is that 'export_fig' won't export lines with fatter lines.
I am wondering if this is a known problem and if there are any solutions to that?
Khoa Tran (view profile)
I use this script in conjunction with your files to produce graph for journal paper. Excellent work, thank you!
%% Resize graph
w = 0.5;h = 0.5; % this is good for double column format
f=gcf;undock(f)
w=round(w*1050);h=round(h*500);
size=[0 0 w h];
set(f,'Units','pixels','Position',size);
%% Printing
r=300;
[name, path] = uiputfile({'*.pdf','PDF';'*.eps','Vector based .eps';'*.jpg;*.tif;*.png;*.gif','All Image Files';'*.*','All Files' },'Save Image','/Users/Eric/Dropbox/Reports/');
export_fig(fullfile(path,name),f,'-a1',['-r',num2str(r)]);%, '-grey','-nocrop'
Carl Esben Poulsen (view profile)
Excellent work!
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
Edison: Set the figure width to 17.3cm, and set the output dpi using the -r300 option in the call to export_fig. If that figure is still too large for your screen, then halve the figure size and double the resolution. If you want the tiff width to say 17.3cm in this case then output the bitmap as an argument from export_fig, and save it yourself using imwrite (setting the 'Resolution' option to 300).
Edison (view profile)
An essential addition to MATLAB, they should include this as standard in future releases. Great.
One question: does export_fig always use the dimensions of the onscreen figure as a guide? For example, I want to export my figure as a TIFF at 300dpi, with a width of 17.3cm. This equates to an image 2049 pixels wide, and this will not fit on my screen. Thanks for the help.
Emma (view profile)
Thank you thank you thank you!!!
Saulo Meirelles (view profile)
Zielinski Christelle (view profile)
Michael (view profile)
Thank you for a great program. It perfectly reproduces complex 2D figures that I could not accurately reproduce using any other method.
Ian (view profile)
Remco Huizenga (view profile)
First of all: many thanks for an amazing tool and all the work you have put in it. It is very much appreciated.
I do have, however, a small question:
I'm trying to export a plot of a uniform distribution between, say, a and b, to the .png format. This obviously means that the function is zero for values lower than a and higher than b. In that case, the function gets overlapped by the axis and is therefore not visible in the exported .png. It is in the MatLab figure. Am I missing something or is there a fix for this? Thanks in advance
Jaap de Vries (view profile)
I got it fixed, code works great!!
When I set the background transparent the part inside the graph remains white, while the sections outside the axis become transparent, any tips?
Regards,
Jaap
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
Jaap: sounds like you're shadowing MATLAB's print() with another function of the same name.
Jaap de Vries (view profile)
add...
Error using print
Too many input arguments.
Jaap de Vries (view profile)
I am really looking forward to using this code but I keep getting the following error...
export_fig 'test.jpg'
Error in print2array (line 140)
print(fig, renderer, res_str, '-dtiff', tmp_nam);
Any help would be apreciated.
Regards, Jaap
Junghwan (view profile)
Werner (view profile)
you just saved my thesis…
pr (view profile)
zhu (view profile)
good
LDELBENE (view profile)
Amazing, but it does not work with transparent surf plots for eps or pdf files.
Arttu Modig (view profile)
Thanks a lot Johannes for the Mac OSX dylib fix!
Zhiyong (view profile)
High memory overhead.
BERDIN (view profile)
J.R.! Menzinger (view profile)
A very useful tool, thanks.
Agnethe (view profile)
Johannes (view profile)
Bugfix for Mac: https://gist.github.com/ahojnnes/7132839
Matlab2010 (view profile)
Long time user of export_fig here. great function -- thanks!
New machine today. 64 bit Windows 8.1, MATLAB 2013B. Latest installation of Ghoscript (9.1) put onto the machine.
A problem occurs with the function ghostscript.m
On executing the code in this m file: check_gs_path(path) a zero is returned.
This causes the software to ask where the location of the ghostscript executable is -- i point it to the correct dir and it fails to find it.
Thus I have had to hard code in
path = 'C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.10\bin\gswin64c.exe';
before check_gs_path(path) is called, which works.
What's going on?
Thanks
Alexander (view profile)
Many thanks. Before find this I was wasting so much time copying the images and then trimming
Antoine Liutkus (view profile)
great, did it whereas matlab could not =) thanks
Bill (view profile)
Hi, Oliver,
How can I use it to export .emf files? Is it possible ?
Marco (view profile)
I used export_fig in a GUI. Anyone who wishes to create a button that saves specific figures to specific locations on their PC, feel free to use the code below (where PLOTTAG is the plot's tag in plot properties):
[file,path] = uiputfile({'*.eps';'*.pdf';'*.png';'*.jpg'},'Save Figure As');
if file ~= 0
%Gets the size of the file name
[empty,filechar]=size(file);
%Deletes the file type from teh end of the file name and stores it
filetype(3) = file(filechar);
filetype(2) = file(filechar-1);
filetype(1) = file(filechar-2);
file(filechar) = [];
file(filechar-1) = [];
file(filechar-2) = [];
file(filechar-3) = [];
%Runs the export_fig command with the path and file name, along with the
%filetype
export_fig(findobj('Tag','PLOTTAG'),[path,file],['-',filetype]);
%Message box
h = msgbox({'Done!';'';...
['The file ',file,'.',filetype,' can be found in:'];path},...
'Save Figure File','none','modal');
elseif isempty(file) == 0
h = msgbox('Not saved.',...
'Save Figure File','none','modal');
end
Will Grant (view profile)
I am using figures with contour lines, thus my figures are: axes > contourgroup > patch objects.
In my exported images, I was getting the axes with all text label objects but no lines.
I had to change line 97 in isolate_axes.m from allchild() to findall() as a fix. I don't know if this breaks anything but it shouldn't as findall just finds all objects lower in the hierarchy than the one passed in, which is the axes handle in this case. I was losing the patch objects that make up the figure as allchild() was only returning the objects at the first level under the axes.
Will
DQ Zhang (view profile)
Great!
BTW, how to set the resolution?
Dun Kirk (view profile)
I got this warning using export_fig(axes_handle):
Warning: Callback for uicontrol of style radiobutton will be overwritten when added to a UIBUTTONGROUP.
Use the SelectionChangeFcn property on the button group instead.
In uitools.uibuttongroup.childAddedCbk at 12
In copyfig at 25
In isolate_axes at 52
In export_fig at 181
Peter (view profile)
Hi Oliver and all,
I used your script quite a lot to make png's. For some reason I get different output ratios, depending on the x and ylabel? (Which is driving me crazy...) I am not sure what I am doing wrong. The effect does not appear with the Matlab print function... but the png is as expected not as nice. Anyone an idea?
Jack (view profile)
Sebastian (view profile)
Leah (view profile)
Worked perfect! Very easy to use. Make sure you close the pdf file you are writing to or you will get a GS error.
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
Sanka: I suspect this has nothing to do with export_fig and everything to do with the software you're using to view the eps file.
Lennart: You can set the default background color for MATLAB figures, outside of export_fig. There is no 'transparent' option, but the help text does mention a '-transparent' option.
Lennart (view profile)
Great tool!
However, I wish to export to a pdf with a white background. Then I have to do 'set(gcf, 'Color', 'w');' every time. Is there a permanent setting or a parameter that can be set?
This does not seem to work: export_fig(fig_handle,'figure.pdf', 'transparent' )
dong (view profile)
Sanka (view profile)
Hi Oliver,
Great file, really should come as standard with MATLAB! Just one issue I am having when exporting to .eps format. All text in the figure (axes numbers and legend text) are being outputted in bold. This is not the case for every other file format such as pdf or tiff, where the figure appears exactly as it does on screen. Any idea why this is happening specifically to eps??
Thanks
Fernando (view profile)
James (view profile)
I just started using this. I mostly only use HG2.
I get the following error when I try to run your example code for creating a .pdf, with HG2.
A = im2double(imread('peppers.png'));
B = randn(ceil(size(A, 1)/6), ceil(size(A, 2)/6), 3) * 0.1;
B = cat(3, kron(B(:,:,1), ones(6)), kron(B(:,:,2), ones(6)), kron(B(:,:,3), ones(6)));
B = A + B(1:size(A, 1),1:size(A, 2),:);
imshow(B)
>> export_fig test.pdf
Error using eps2pdf (line 107)
Error: /undefined in bdef
Operand stack:
dom --nostringval--
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push
--nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push 1932 1 3
%oparray_pop 1931 1 3 %oparray_pop 1915 1 3 %oparray_pop 1803 1 3 %oparray_pop
--nostringval-- %errorexec_pop .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2
%stopped_push --nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1190/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:77/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Current file position is 64
GPL Ghostscript 9.10: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
Error in export_fig (line 431)
eps2pdf(tmp_nam, pdf_nam, 1, options.append, options.colourspace==2, options.quality);
I do not get this error when I am not using HG2, but it would take awhile for me to convert everything back from HG2. Do you have any ideas how to fix the problem?
(Note, laprint also doesn't seem to work with HG2. So, this could be a problem with HG2 and not have anything to do with your files.)
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
David: The grid lines are the width specified (by setting the axes line width), but the segments are shorter (there's no option to change this). Try using thicker grid lines.
David (view profile)
Excellent work, many thanks! Question though, I'm finding that when printing, the only objects not reproduced "as shown" are the gridlines. The output gridlines are much fainter and barely visible. Any way to address this? Thanks!
Manuel (view profile)
Mikolaj Magnuski (view profile)
Mikolaj Magnuski (view profile)
max, does it work if you try:
export_fig('/Users/maxnorris/Desktop/test.png',H);
or:
export_fig('/Users/maxnorris/Desktop/test','-png',H);
?
max (view profile)
Oliver,
I have just downloaded your code and it seems to be receiving great reviews. I can't seem to get it to work though... All i want to do is to save a figure window to my desktop.
I have a figure that is displaying an image. How would I use export_fig to save this figure under the name 'test' in png format?
This is what I am seeing: (H is set to be the figure handle)
>>export_fig('/Users/maxnorris/Desktop/test','png',H)
Error using print
Too many input arguments.
Error in print2array (line 140)
print(fig, renderer, res_str, '-dtiff', tmp_nam);
Error in export_fig (line 334)
[A, tcol] = print2array(fig, magnify, renderer);
Jeff (view profile)
Awesome work!! It is so much better than the Matlab default export system. Thank you very much for creating this great function for us.
Kirsten (view profile)
Ozan Oguz (view profile)
Following two comments are mine.
I said I am using "uicomponent" for my GUI.
Actually, I am using " "GUI Layout Toolbox".
I am sorry for the misinforming.
Ozan Oguz (view profile)
I realised something:
I am using "uicomponent" for my GUI.
After giving "print" command (export_fig),my GUI changes.
What changes exactly?
1) All "uiextras.Empty" objects seem to vanish.
2) Legend in the axes becomes uneditable.
For now, this is what I observed.
Ozan Oguz (view profile)
This seems to be a great app, thx!
I have a question/problem:
I designed a GUI using uicomponent.m from file exchange. Left part is for controls, right part is for axes.
When I try to export the image of this axes, two different things happen for bitmap and vector formats. 1) For pdf, it gives me only the axes, and this is what I want, but 2) For png or jpg, it also gives me the empty area behind the control buttons on the left side of the axes.
I want a bitmap image with only the axes. Nothing more.
Can you help me, please, Oliver?
WurmD (view profile)
Hi Oliver,
Let me add my voiceto the chorus: "Fantastic work!" :)
Now, I notice one thing you change is the grid lines to "- Improved line and grid line styles"
Which in my plot have been "No grid lines"
It would be nice to have the option of keeping the grid lines as shown, and keep your "Improved line and grid lines" as default
I looked into the code but couldn't figure where you're not adding the grid lines to the pdf
Will you create such an option (keep grid lines)? Will you tell me how?
Cheers!
Isabella Osetinsky-Tzidaki (view profile)
Wonderful performance with fast help from Oliver as if online talk! Save memory and run-time with '-a1' option while keeping quality as plotted, applying it as follows:
set(gcf,'color','w')
export_fig(filename,'-png','-a1','-nocrop')
Oliver Woodford (view profile)
Tim: You're missing the -nocrop option.
Tim Garrett (view profile)
Terrific function, but I am unclear on one thing. I wish to create a little booklet of figures where the page size and axis locations are precisely defined. e.g.
h = figure;
set(h,'units','inches','position',[0 0 8.5 11]);
plot(x,y);
set(gca,'Position',[0.2, 0.2, 0.6, 0.6];
Using 'print', my printed figure is placed exactly where I want within the page I want (albeit with stupid matlab problems). With 'export_fig' however, the output is *only* of the figure. The figure is not within a page.
What am I missing?
Thanks.