Export

Every MTEX figure is an ordinary MATLAB figure and can therefore be exported with File / Save As from the figure menu, or with the MATLAB commands print and exportgraphics. Doing so, however, usually leaves a broad white margin around the plot, and for spatial EBSD maps it interpolates between neighbouring pixels, which invents colors that are not in the data. For this reason MTEX comes with its own command saveFigure, which is meant to produce cropped, publication ready files.

The command saveFigure

Let us start with any plot

plottingConvention.default('y↑→x');
mtexdata forsterite silent

plot(ebsd('Forsterite'),ebsd('Forsterite').orientations)

The output format of saveFigure is determined entirely by the file extension. Everything MATLAB can print is allowed - pdf, eps, ps for vector graphics and png, jpg, tif, gif, bmp for bitmaps.

% we write into the temporary folder to not pollute the MTEX folder
outFile = fullfile(tempdir,'forsterite.png');

saveFigure(outFile)

and indeed the file has been written

dir(outFile)

forsterite.png

Vector graphics versus bitmaps

The two groups of formats are treated quite differently.

Vector formats (pdf, eps, ps) are written by print. Before printing, saveFigure sets the paper size to the size of the figure, so that the resulting page is exactly as large as the plot and carries no margin. If the figure is not in painters mode it is switched over, since only painters mode produces true vector output. Note that a spatial EBSD map with one patch per pixel becomes a very large file in a vector format - for maps a bitmap is usually the better choice.

Bitmap formats are written by export_fig, at 1.5 times the screen resolution. On a spatial map plot MTEX increases this to 2.5 and switches graphics smoothing off, so that no colors appear in the image that are not in the map itself. This matters as soon as the image is used to read back orientations by their color.

Two options are passed on to the underlying tools

Both shell out to a TeX distribution and are therefore only available on Unix like systems.

Controlling the size of the output

The resolution of a bitmap follows the size of the figure on screen. Hence the way to obtain a larger or smaller image is to ask for a larger or smaller figure in the first place, using the option 'figSize'

plot(ebsd('Forsterite'),ebsd('Forsterite').orientations,'figSize','small')

The recognized values are 'tiny', 'small', 'normal', 'large' and 'huge', and they are relative to the screen size. The default is stored as an MTEX preference and can be changed permanently by setMTEXpref('figSize','large').

For a multi plot the size refers to the entire figure, not to the individual plots

plotPDF(ebsd('Forsterite').orientations,Miller({1,0,0},{0,1,0},{0,0,1},ebsd('Forsterite').CS),...
  'contourf','figSize','normal')
mtexColorbar

saveFigure(fullfile(tempdir,'pdf.png'))

Exporting the data instead of the picture

Quite often what is really wanted is not the picture but the numbers behind it. Most MTEX classes therefore have their own export command, e.g. export for orientations, export for pole figure data and export for ODFs. Those are described in the corresponding chapters.

% clean up
delete(fullfile(tempdir,'forsterite.png'))
delete(fullfile(tempdir,'pdf.png'))