Printing Figure to PDF produces bitmap instead of vector

Hi,

I've three figures that I save to a pdf for inclusion in my report. For this i user: print(h,'-dpdf',filename); where h is the handle of the figure. All figures are plotted with the plot command, although the first image is just a combination of lines. While the other two are actually scatterplots, but plotted with the plot command for speed. Now with the print command the first figure is correctly saved as a a vector image, while the other two are bitmaps.

How is this possible? And how can I prevent this/correct this?

Thanks,

ChoKamir

Answer 1

[Jan]

Check the 'Renderer' property of the figures: While figures drawn by the 'Painters' renderer are vector plots in the exported PDF, with 'OpenGL' and 'ZBuffer' the PDF contains bitmap pictures of the screen output.

Either you have defined the renderer manually, or it was set automatically by Matlab, if the 'RendererMode' of the figure is 'auto'.

Solution: Set the renderer manually to 'Painters'.

[Matthew]

This answer just saved me a lot of heartache and pain. Thank you!

[LeChat]

fig1=figure(1);
fig1.Renderer='Painters';

Thank you Jan!

[neuromechanist]

But the point is graphics provided by Painters is nothing that can be compared to OpenGL rendering. I am back to OpenGL until I need to modify a figure in Vector environment. But for presenting figures AsIs, Painters is not a good choice.

Answer 2

[Matlabber 1.0]

in case you are using surf() plots, make sure you don't use too many points. the following code shows how surf makes the saved pdf become a bitmap aboe 180x180 points:

function TestVectorGraph
    h=figure(1);clf; 
    for k=178:185
        xrange=linspace(0,1,k+1);
        yrange=linspace(0,1,k+1);
        [x,y]=ndgrid(xrange,yrange);
        surf(x,y,x.^2+y.^2);
        fname=sprintf('Testvector%03d.pdf',k)
        print(fname,'-dpdf')
    end
end

anybody knows more about this? i guess it's for file size reasons.

[Katrina Deane]

Hi there,

I came here for this exact reason so thank you!

I just tried Jan's solution above and it seems that manually changing the renderer to Painters overrides this so that it's vector.

I'm guessing you're right about size reasons, because now my design software is having difficultly handling so many objects.

Answer 3

[Aleksey Dyskin]

Hi Jan,

despite the fact that I use

fig1=figure(1)
fig1.Renderer='Painters';

to set the renderer, when I print the figure to PDF, it still remains in bitmap... Any ideas of what can be a reason for it? Thank you!

[Johnny Zheng]

Good idea! Don't know if MATLAB developer will see this Q&A.