Mike on the MATLAB Desktop

November 16th, 2009

Sometimes one of my colleagues comes up with a big idea that’s so brilliant, it can be succinctly summarized in a small phrase that downplays its impact. Publish to PDF pretty much says it all. In MATLAB R2009b you can now publish your MATLAB code directly to a PDF-file.

If you’re like me, you probably used to publish to doc and then use Google docs to convert it to a PDF. Well now you can go to PDF directly, and get a higher quality document than you would by going through Word and then to pdf.

That’s pretty much the whole peanut butter sandwhich right there. The easiest way to set this up is through a Publish Configuration.

Here is an image of the output of the sine wave publishing demo (click to see a larger version):

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You can also watch this lovely video on how this new feature works.

By Michael Katz

Mike is a developer on the MATLAB Mobile team. When not describing himself in the third person, biking, homebrewing, or rooting for the home team, he's busy trying to make the world a better place for programming.

14:06 UTC | Posted in Publish | Permalink | 11 Comments »

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11 Responses to “Publish to PDF”

1. Daniel Armyr replied on November 17th, 2009 at 08:41 UTC :
   

   A word of caution when using this feature, though. It appears that in some cases when regenerating a file, all plots are not properly updated. Bug report has been written.

   Other than that, this has been at the top of my wish-list for many years.

2. Mike replied on November 17th, 2009 at 12:59 UTC :
   

   @Daniel, Thanks for that note.

3. Herve replied on November 18th, 2009 at 08:26 UTC :
   

   I wonder when the publish fonction will be supported in standalone mode.

4. Ken replied on November 18th, 2009 at 12:58 UTC :
   

   Hi Herve,

   I’m not quite sure what you mean by “stand-alone” mode?

   -Ken

5. OysterEngineer replied on November 18th, 2009 at 16:27 UTC :
   

   When I first learned of the Publish feature in MatLab, I thought it might be useful to help to document my code. But, I haven’t figured out a work-flow that makes that work well.

   Since then, I’ve concluded that the Publish feature is really best for making technical lectures. Thus, MatLab has used this feature well for their own training materials & I suspect that many professors use it also in technical classes.

6. Daniel Armyr replied on November 23rd, 2009 at 15:09 UTC :
   

   @OysterEngineer:
   I use publish to document pretty much everything I do. first make one file which does everything that might require human och other machine interaction but as little else as possible. Save your data.
   Then make a publishable file where you read out your data and do signal processing as well as cosmetics on it. That file is the one you publish.

7. OysterEngineer replied on November 23rd, 2009 at 18:45 UTC :
   

   @Daniel,

   It seems like some of your post was truncated.

   Reading between the lines, it seems like your workflow would require 2 separate copies of the guts of the code. How do you manage the process of keeping the guts identical?

8. Sune replied on February 23rd, 2010 at 12:47 UTC :
   

   I have the same problem as reported by Daniel Armyr on november 17th 2009, ie. my plots are not updated when I regenerate a file publishing to pdf. What is the status of this bug?

   Sune

9. Mike replied on February 23rd, 2010 at 13:13 UTC :
   

   @Sune,

   We update our products twice a year (generally March and October) with new features and bug fixes…stay tuned.

10. houssemus replied on December 6th, 2011 at 13:21 UTC :
    

    hi, i used to this option in Matlab 2009b, but with the 2011, i’m having an error message don’t know why,

    ??? Java exception occurred:
    java.io.FileNotFoundException: F:\Program
    Files\MATLAB\R2011a\toolbox\matlab\codetools\private\fop_config.xml
    (Le fichier spécifié est introuvable)

11. Michael Katz replied on December 13th, 2011 at 10:49 UTC :
    

    @houssemus,
    I’m not sure what is going on with your issue, please contact Technical Support.

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