exporting svg image from matlab surface plot

Question

I need some to produce some publication-quality figures. I first export the figures from matlab in .svg format, and then I do some post-processing in inkscape. I am no problem with figures generated using plot or scatter, but when I export figures generated using surf (in view(2)), I run into problems. If I use plot or scatter, I am able to ungroup and process various parts like the title, axes, scattered points, lines, etc. in inkscape. For surf, however, matlab just exports one single figures with all various parts grouped into one single unit. I can't separate individual part, and when I zoom very close I can actually see the bitmap resolution for the axes and titles (if I use plot, the titles and axes have 'infinite' resolution when I zoom very close). I am fine with the surface plot having finite resolution, but I need to at least be able to process the axes and titles (which I currently cannot do). What should I do so that I can 'separate' the title and axes from the main plot, just like figures generated from plot and scatter?

Answer 1

I stumbled across this question, since I encountered the same problem.

As mentioned by @vindarmagnus, it is possible to use tikz and get rather nice results. However, tikz experiences problems with large data sets in my experience as present when using surf etc..

Solution, that worked for me:

Change the renderer to painters and the exported .svg file will retain its vectorgraphic properties when opened e.g. in inkscape:

figure('Renderer','Painters');

Answer 2

I used to use Inkscape for my scientific publications as well, but I found that a lot of the time you can get better results with pgfplots in latex, together with the matlab2tikz matlabscript. There’s a ton of resources about this online, but here’s how my workflow would look adopted to your surf situation. I have macOSX with latex, matlab and matlab2tikz installed. Will work with little to no modifications on linux.

In Matlab:

surf(peaks(25))
matlab2tikz('plot.tikz’)

Then I have the following bash-script (just a script in the same folder as the image, which is executed by mere double-click). (Needs to be chmod-ed as an executable for that).

#!/bin/bash

cd ~/Desktop
rm *.eps

cat > plot.tex << EOF
\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\pgfplotsset{max space between ticks=50}
\pgfplotsset{scaled ticks = false}
\pgfplotsset{compat=1.6}
\pgfplotsset{xticklabel style={/pgf/number format/fixed}}
\pgfplotsset{yticklabel style={/pgf/number format/fixed}}
\begin{document}
\input{plot.tikz}
\end{document}
EOF

pdflatex plot.tex
pdf2ps   plot.pdf
ps2eps   plot.ps

Note that the row cd ~/Desktop above should be changed as to reflect which folder the script is supposed to be run from (a bit crappy, but needed since Finder doesn’t properly pass along the folder from a program is executed, afaik).

This yields high-quality images in eps or pdf or what you like, with a ton of settings for axes and ticks etc. And it all uses native latex fonts.

Edit: Recently I’ve begun to use patch() in matlab and then export it to tikz in the same manner as above, with great results. That’s another suggestion!

Answer 3

You can use also:

set(gcf,'Renderer','Painters')