You probably don’t see any difference between the lines on the screen, because MATLAB graphics currently don’t support real antialiasing.

For example, a typical screen resolution is 96 pixels per inch. A point is 1/72th of an inch. This means that the 1 point line is 1 1/3 pixels, while the 0.5 point line is 2/3 pixels. So both lines get rounded to 1 pixel.

However, I have relayed your comment over to development.

My number-1 beef with Matlab is the quality of the display graphics. I don’t understand why

>> plot(1:10,’linewi’,1)
>> hold on
>> plot((1:10)+1,’linewi’,0.5)

look exactly the same on the screen despite looking quite different in anything sent to print. Is there a reason for this limitation in this day and age, or do I have something set inappropriately?

I just found a tip for anti-ailiasing lines. Just add the attribute ‘LineSmoothing’,'on’. i.e.

line([x0n x1n],[y0n y1n],’LineWidth’,2,’LineSmoothing’,'on’);

It doesn’t appear to be documented in matlab but it works nicely.

@Quan,
Thanks for your comments. Yes, functions for automatically pasting MATLAB plots into a PowerPoint presentation can be very useful. In fact, now you can do this by using MATLAB’s publish capability and selecting PPT as the output format.

http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/matlab_env/briymz8-1.html#bri9_s4

This post raises a question with me: Does matlab use hardware accellerated graphics? And if so, why not allow hardware-accelerated anti-aliasing?

In terms of creating presentations, I’ve written some scripts that create plots and then automatically copies and pastes them into a powerpoint presentation. It is really useful when you’re processing a large batch of data!