Saturday, October 12, 2013

Nicer Octave Plots for Presentations/Documents

GNU Octave has a very capable plotting system (which is transitioning away from gnuplot as its backend, even as we "speak"). Quite often, you generate a figure and make it look like you want:

You then want to incorporate it into some other document - say a presentation or a document.

So you say:

print -dpng test0.png

Note that you could also use -depsc2 or -dpdf to generate EPS or PDF formats among a whole host of other possibilities.

You get a figure that looks like:

Clearly imperfect.

There are a number of ways to improve the image.

These include writing to tikz, TeX, which gives you exquisite control over all features, but this can take too much effort.

Or you could spend time fiddling with adjustable parameters to make the plot look just right. If you are trying to work on "the" central plot of a paper, or a PhD thesis, then such care is certainly warranted.

But if you are merely dissatisfied (as I am) with the size and font of the text, there is an easy fix.

print -dpng -FHelvetica:18 test1.png


No comments: