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From: Lars on 20 May 2010 16:20
Hi all,

I am trying to prepare a number of figures for a publication. Most/all of them are less than straightforward in terms of the matlab graphics commands needed. E.g.
* boxplots with complex labels and grouped in a non-trivial way,
* subplots with overall and individual x/y-axis labels,
* line plots where the legends should explain only some of the lines
* subplots with individual legends (where the text is rather different in length)
* "titles" over colorbars to give a brief explanation, and x-axis label to tell the unit of the colorscale.
* etc. , etc ...

In all these examples I run into problems with unwanted 'dynamic behavior'.

Axes are resized despite they are programmatically (or manually tweaked) to align in subplots (seems to be the legends that play some foul game on me). Boxplot labels that definetly have their own idea about the layout of the illustration and do not accept anything but their own standards. Things that look OK on the sceen and then changes when printed (or previewed)....

After having yet again spent many many (!) hours tediously experimenting to find workarounds that disarm the rather stubborn un-intelligence of some graphic elements I am getting seriously fed up. The last thing some minute ago was solved by tediously experimenting where two legends in subplots should be placed, as well as their size, in a non-WYSIWYG way on the screen in order to compensate for the 'printing dynamics' that resize/reposition things when printing to an eps file. Sigh. This cannot be the best way...

I know that I am not the first to come across these features, so is there some collective wisdom here at CSSM regarding how to be do WYSIWYG graphics of some complexity (in ML 2008b and 2009a/b)?

Else it is time to look for some other tools. Any suggestions?

Best,
Lars
From: Matt Fig on 20 May 2010 16:33
I have used Oliver Woodford's nice tool (exportfig) for publication purposes. It does take care of a lot of the horrendous problems MATLAB seems to have with exporting a figure.

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/23629-exportfig

By the way, I know the frustration you talk about. When I was first introduced to MATLAB about 6 years ago, I fell in love with it. I thought it was the coolest software ever invented, that is until I had to export a simple figure for a paper I was working on. I seriously almost screamed my lungs out and walked away from ever using MATLAB again over the many hours of wasted time to simply get WYSIWYG. My mentor finally showed me a custom built function he used to get his figures just right for publication.

Give Oliver's tool a try.
From: Lars on 20 May 2010 17:19
"Matt Fig" <spamanon(a)yahoo.com> wrote in message <ht46a1$4dq$1(a)fred.mathworks.com>...
> I have used Oliver Woodford's nice tool (exportfig) for publication purposes. It does take care of a lot of the horrendous problems MATLAB seems to have with exporting a figure.
>
> http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/23629-exportfig
>

Thanks, this looks promising, at least once I gotten all the stuff at their intended place (like legend/colorbar titles and x/y-axis labels, not to mention the boxplot labels)...

Lars
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