Several Tips for Publishing Images from Matlab: PDF to Word, Font Size in Ubuntu etc.

Matlab provides some great convenience in creating high quality figures. However, esp. when you try to integrate these figures into your Word version of the paper, quite a few tweaks are needed.

1. Create, crop and insert high quality PDF images into word.

Matlab can create PDF or EPS figure quite easily by the print command, and you can even use LaTeX to combine multiple figures into one when you have to (subplot in Matlab create a very large margin between figures). However, one problem is to crop off the margins around the PDF. "pdfcrop" is a command line program in Ubuntu, but apparently it can not remove the margin on the bottom of the PDF. I found a nice Java program:

http://www.pdfscissors.com/

This can do the job quite nicely.

Then, before inserting PDF into word, keep in mind that there is no way to include such vector image into M$ Word documents. We have to convert it into high-quality TIFF image. There are quite a few options for this, just make sure to create TIFF image with 600 dpi. Just to be safe.

2. Change font size of Matlab figure in Ubuntu and save it into EPS.

This is a weird problem I had for a long time. Every time I tried to set the font size of Matlab figure in Ubuntu, it does not work. The same code works fine in Windows 7. The problem was that a font package is missing for Ubuntu. Just type:


sudo apt-get install xfonts-75dpi

Log out and log in, then it all works fine. Also, before save the figure as EPS, make sure to include:

set(gcf, 'PaperPositionMode', 'auto');

Redirecting Console Outputs in Visual Studio

Instead of writing the file stream objects into your code, a simpler solution is to redirect the output just like the pipeline in Linux.

Basically, you just have to go to project properties -> Debugging -> Command Arguments, and add:
"> Output.txt".

Here is a nice post for it:
http://asawicki.info/news_1496_redirecting_output_to_file_in_visual_c.html

Make LaTeX floats behave better

LaTeX floating objects can easily give me headaches. Today I saw this link:

http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/bibliog/latex/floats.html

It provides a set of really neat commands to put in the beginning of your document, and all of a sudden the floats behave so nicely now :-)

% Alter some LaTeX defaults for better treatment of figures:
    % See p.105 of "TeX Unbound" for suggested values.
    % See pp. 199-200 of Lamport's "LaTeX" book for details.
    %   General parameters, for ALL pages:
    \renewcommand{\topfraction}{0.9} % max fraction of floats at top
    \renewcommand{\bottomfraction}{0.8} % max fraction of floats at bottom
    %   Parameters for TEXT pages (not float pages):
    \setcounter{topnumber}{2}
    \setcounter{bottomnumber}{2}
    \setcounter{totalnumber}{4}     % 2 may work better
    \setcounter{dbltopnumber}{2}    % for 2-column pages
    \renewcommand{\dbltopfraction}{0.9} % fit big float above 2-col. text
    \renewcommand{\textfraction}{0.07} % allow minimal text w. figs
    %   Parameters for FLOAT pages (not text pages):
    \renewcommand{\floatpagefraction}{0.7} % require fuller float pages
 % N.B.: floatpagefraction MUST be less than topfraction !!
    \renewcommand{\dblfloatpagefraction}{0.7} % require fuller float pages

 % remember to use [htp] or [htpb] for placement