plot(1:10, 1:10);
set(gca,'XTickLabel','10^4');

It produces 10^4 instead of 10 raised to the power of 5.

I need this when chaning labels on a histogram. There no way in matlab do generate nice histograms of log binned data.

Any suggestions?

Martin

I have one question, though.
I have a problem with the minor and major tick thickness.
When I put my eps graph into my latex code, I can definitely see that the minor and major ticks have a different thickness and are a tiny bit (but noticeably) offset. Like in your last graph the 1000 kg tick for example. You can see that the minor tick is drawn over the major tick, has a different thickness and is a little offset.

Any help would be great

Mat

I realize that many of you out there may be .eps devotees, but this solution is much more workable than the multiple saves many people describe. Plus, I find that I am able to get the plots much better looking this way, and then if they require subtle editing, I can do it in Illustrator.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that Latex (pdflatex that is) works great using just .pdf figures, and this is a great option because the .pdf format can store both vector and bitmap information (also, your text stays text this way, instead of rasterizing…), so I think it’s the way to go. EPS people will say that .eps does the same thing, but not really, because look how much trouble it is to create a decent looking .eps from MATLAB. Not to mention the fact that .eps files aren’t compatible with much at all and very few programs will open them.

So, I’m just saying, save yourself time and effort, get a better quality graphic that many programs can open–it’ll still be vector and you can avoid using 1980s technology.

This seems to work on my computer:

plot(rand(10,4))
set(gca, 'box', 'off');
set(gca, 'ytick', []);
set(gca, 'ycolor', get(gcf, 'color'));
print -depsc test.eps

Joe

You’re pretty close. To get different effects in the legend, you should modify the second return value from LEGEND. But you should know which element of the handle array to modify. By doing GET on each of the element of the returned handle array, you’ll notice that the array is structured in this way:

legend text for line 1
legend text for line 2
...
line style for line 1
marker style for line 1
line style for line 2
marker style for line 2
...

With this in mind, you can change the marker size in the legend this way:

plot(rand(10, 4), '.');
[a,b,c,d] = legend('line1', 'line2', 'line3', 'line4');
set(b(6:2:end), 'MarkerSize', 20);

Hope this helps.

Help, please! I understand the value of keeping the legend in sync with the plot but surely it should be possible to have a different MarkerSize.

Thank you and other contributors for a fantastic thread. I followed several tips from the thread and got two great results:

1. I fixed a chronic problem with cutting-and-pasting MatLab figures using Mac OS X -> Preview -> Adobe illustrator CS. The problem was MatLab’s use of ISO encoding: I’m happy to expand if anyone else wants to know why fonts which look nice in MatLab come out mangled in Illustrator.

2. At last I have pleasantly dashed lines, and round caps on lines and points. Hooray! My eyes really are saying “thank you”.

For what it’s worth, in my local copy I added the following lines to Jiro’s code (the first five lines are his: they set the context):

% Open file and read it in
fid = fopen(varargin{1}, ‘r’);
str = fread(fid);
str = char(str’);
fclose(fid);

%% The following lines fix MatLab’s font infelicity and square cap ugliness.

% Use standard (not ISO Latin) encoding
str = strrep(str, ‘ISOLatin1Encoding’, ‘StandardEncoding’);

% Set caps to rounded
str = strrep(str, ‘0 cap’, ‘1 cap’);

In case you haven’t checked, there are number of user-contributed functions for doing this:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/?term=horizontal+errorbars