Paper Quality Plot for MATLAB

Create publication-ready figures with beautiful MATLAB visualizations.

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✨ Sample Gallery

CDF Visualization	3D Trajectory	Scatter w/ Heatmap
Advanced Boxplot	Publication Bar Plot	Tile Layout
PDF Visualization	Line Graph	Stacked Time Plot

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📋 Introduction

(01.09.25) I have now given up on sticking solely to MATLAB. SciencePlots is truly an excellent tool.

This repository contains essential tools and techniques for creating publication-quality figures in MATLAB:

• 🎨 LineSpecer for beautiful and distinguishable line colors (FileExchange)
• 📝 LaTeX interpreter for legends and labels
• 🔧 White space removal methods
• 🔤 LaTeX fonts for tick labels
• 📐 TileLayout functionality (MATLAB R2020a+)
• 🔢 Thousand separator formatting

All output examples are located in the imgs folder.

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Must be added for the Paper-quality Figures

👉 Add set(gca,'LooseInset', max(get(gca,'TightInset'), 0.02)) below the figure declaration line.

👉 Add set(groot, 'defaultAxesTickLabelInterpreter','latex'); below the figure declaration line.

👉 Add ytickformat('%,4.4g'); after plot( ) command (optional).

The template is available on here

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When it comes to saving figures in eps...

ENG) I realized that some matlab figures (e.g., bar plot, tiles, or 3D plot) can not be saved in the vector format even though the file format is saved into .eps.

So, we must use below command as follows:

% gcf: figure object
% -r${NUM}: The larger, the higher resolution
print(gcf, "SET_YOUR_FINENAME.png",'-dpng','-r300'); 

KOR) Matlab에서 원래 eps로 저장하면 자동으로 그림이 vector format으로 변경되어야 하는데, 그렇지 않은 경우가 있습니다.

그럴 경우에는 아래와 같이 dpi를 조정하여 png로 논문에 넣을 수 밖에 없습니다.

% gcf: figure object
% -r${NUM}: The larger, the higher resolution
print(gcf, "SET_YOUR_FINENAME.png",'-dpng','-r300'); 

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Generated Figures

Click on image titles to view the corresponding MATLAB script

Description

Plot cdf

Note that the effect of the linespecer which is illustrated as:

Before using linespecer

After using linespecer

linespecer is more beautiful! It allows the figures to be more clean and improves readability.

So, I strongly recommend utilizing linespecer!

Please refer to the line 7 to 9 and 124 to 133 in plot_cdf.m :)

Plot pdf

Note that the built-in pdf function of matlab does not work sometimes. My method is better!

Plot 3D colormap trajectory

The trajectory is colored with respect to sequence length.

However, if the trajectory is too long, then it may be not applicable.

Plot scatter w/ heatmap

Line graph1

Line graph2

Plot boxplots (improved)

Note that multiple_boxplot_time.m function is required

Plot boxplots

ToDo. Set the fonts of ticks as Times New Roman

Plot barplot

Only available on R2020a.

Tilelayout

Only available on R2020a.

ToDo. Set the fonts of ticks as Times New Roman

Stacked time plot