Preparing figures for publication

Here is a summary of the most important steps and commands necessary to obtain nice figures of your data that can be imported into the text editing program of your choice.

Scaling

Here is how to set the figure dimensions to (8 x 6) cm:

fig = figure;

% create figure here

fig.Units               = 'centimeters';
fig.Position(3)         = 8;
fig.Position(4)         = 6;

Alternatively, you can do the following and use the gcf command:

set(gcf, 'units', 'centimeters', 'position', [0 0 width height])

The maximum width for one-column and two-column figures, respectively, is usually given by the journal you want to submit to. Or, if you are using a LaTeX, you can output the required widths with the \the command:

\the\hsize

Formatting text

Here we select the font Times and set the font size to 9.

set(fig.Children, 'FontName', 'Times', 'FontSize', 9);

Remove unnecessary white space

As the white space surrounding the plot wastes a lot of the precious figure space, especially for small figures, it should be removed (or minimized) in the next step:

set(gca, 'LooseInset', max(get(gca,'TightInset'), 0.02))

Exporting

The figure can be exported to the desired graphics format. This can be done with the saveas command, but the print command allows for the definition of more attributes of the exported file.

First, in order for the exported file to have the same size as the Matlab figure, it's necessary to first set the PaperPositionMode to automatic. Then we export the current figure to a png file with 600 dpi resolution:

fig.PaperPositionMode   = 'auto';
print('img/my_figure', '-dpng', '-r600')

If using vector graphics, -dpng can be replaced by -epsc for colored eps or -dsvg.

Summary

Here is a simple copy-pastable template:

filename = 'something';  % output file name
width = 8; % cm
height = 5; % cm

fig.Units               = 'centimeters';
fig.Position(3)         = width;
fig.Position(4)         = height;
set(fig, 'LooseInset', max(get(gca,'TightInset'), 0.02))
set(fig, 'PaperPositionMode','auto', 'PaperUnits','centimeters', 'PaperSize',[fig.Position(3), fig.Position(4)])
print(filename, '-dpng', '-r600')  % save as png using 600 dpi resolution
print(filename, '-dtiff', '-r600')  % save as svg using 600 dpi resolution
print(filename, '-dpdf', '-r600')  % save as pdf using 600 dpi resolution
print(filename, '-dsvg', '-r600')  % save as svg using 600 dpi resolution