When ever I want to write a research paper and print the simulated results (by Matlab) into an .eps file, I think of a direct way of translating Matlab fig files into LaTeX (especially TikZ).
Is there a way to do such a thing?
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4Yes, there is : http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/22022-matlab2tikz– zugggJun 20, 2013 at 4:52
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I wonder Why would you want to do the conversion vs. just include graphics? Matlab's exportfig mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/23629-exportfig experts excellent quality image from Matlab grphics. What advantage are there to convert it to Tikz and then use that in Latex? Will the result be better than including ps or png in the Latex document? Thanks.– NasserJun 20, 2013 at 4:53
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5@Nasser Because the result is far from excellent with matlab.– percusseJun 20, 2013 at 5:35
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3@Nasser: just including images does not ensure you to have the same font of the rest of the document; usually, one immediately perceives this difference. That's why if you compare two copies of the same document, one done including pictures, the other done creating pictures with, say, TikZ you will realize how much the quality differs. For a more detailed picture, refer to Why draw diagrams using LaTeX when there are open source tools like OpenOffice?– Claudio FiandrinoJun 20, 2013 at 6:28
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1 Answer
As mentioned in zuggg's comment, you can convert MATLAB figures to TikZ by using the matlab2tikz script. What this does is collect the data points and then uses the PGFPlots \addplot table to recreate the plot. The author wrote the script so that it also works in GNU Octave, but the MATLAB Central license does not allow use of the shared software in non-MathWorks products.
Octave, on the other hand, has built-in export capabilities via the print -dtikz command. When using the FLTK graphics toolkit, it will generate lower-level PGF commands, and when using Gnuplot, it will generate higher-level TikZ commands. In both cases, the plot is built from basic graphical building blocks (tiny rectangles in some cases) and look inferior to the PGFPlots approach, especially when zoomed in.
Another advantage to the matlab2tikz script is that it provides key-value arguments which allow you to do this:
matlab2tikz('width', '.8\textwidth')
This also shows that you can specify the plot size in terms of TeX sizes. I didn't find a way to do this with the Octave print command, and the resulting figures were either too small or too big.
