Question

How can I suppress the display of a figure window while keeping the plotting in the background for saving the resulting plot at the end of run? What is the best practice to do this? At present, my code is like this:

showPlot = 1; % switch to turn plotting on/off

fig = figure(1); clf; hold on;
lineHandle = line(nan, nan);
total = 0;

for i = 1:10000
    % long calculation
    total = total + 1;
    set(0, 'CurrentFigure', fig);
    xlim([0, total]);
    x = [get(lineHandle, 'XData'), total];
    y = [get(lineHandle, 'YData'), rand()];
    set(lineHandle, 'XData', x, 'YData', y);       
    drawnow;
end

% saveas(gcf, file, 'png');

I want to set up the code in such a way that when I set showPlot to 0, the figure window is not shown but the plot is saved to file.

Answer 1

To make the current figure not visible:

set(gcf,'visible','off')