Question

I am a Mac (10.6.8) user. I have written MATLAB code for plotting calculation results and then saving the plots as pdfs. I use “saveas” (see example below).

I get this error:

??? Error using ==> print at 325
Problem converting PostScript. System returned error: -1.Failed to convert to output format; Ghostscript status: -100.**** Unable to open the initial device, quitting.

Error in ==> saveas at 155
        print( h, name, ['-d' dev{i}] )

Error in ==> Results_processor at 1219
saveas(gcf,saveFigTo1, 'pdf')

Here is the relevant piece of code:

calculationResultsPath    = '/Me/Projects/ThisProject';
calculationResultsDirectory          = strcat( calculationResultsPath,'MATLABProcessedResults' );
mkdir( calculationResultsDirectory );

% ...Code for importing results to be plotted from external files (works fine)...

% ...Code for plotting (works fine)... I get the figures I want.

% The problem is:
saveFigTo1    = strcat(resultsDirectory,'/majorsMgO.pdf') 
saveas(gcf,saveFigTo1, 'pdf') 
hold off
pause
clf;

Some further information… This worked fine last week when I first wrote it! Since then, I think I updated to Mac OS 10.6.8 from 10.6.7, but nothing else has changed in my code or in the version of Matlab I use (R2009a) (unless I have a very bad memory!).

Also, I came across some older suggestions on similar questions to use “print.” I tried using:

print(gcf,’filename’). I did get a pdf, but it would not open in any pdf viewing programme. I assume (but don’t know for sure) that this could be related to the fact that I use a Mac. I have noticed that there are a few things (especially related to external file manipulation) that don’t run on Mac.

If anyone could help, I would be very grateful.

---

Update:
I found a GhostScript for Mac and installed it as Chris suggested. Unfortunately, that didn’t work. I read on a forum that many Mac users are having problems with MATLAB plots at present, possibly related to java. There was an operating system update (to OS X 10.6.8) last week and that is when the problems began. My code worked before then.

I still have not found a solution to this and I don’t think the MATLAB people have either, so if anyone has suggestions about how to save plots WITHOUT using saveas, I would love to hear them. The “print” command does not work for me either–it produces PDFs that I can’t open.

Answer 1

One recommendation I can make is to use a different format that OS X understands and simply convert the result to pdf with a system call

See if the following works:

% Load a test image
im = imread('cameraman.tif');

imshow(im); % display the image

saveas(gcf,'test.tif','tif');

% convert to pdf using a syscall to cupsfilter
!cupsfilter test.tif > test.pdf 2> /dev/null

% open the file with your default pdf viewer 
!open test.pdf

If the above is not working, yet another approach is to get the bitmap from the figure window and write it using imwrite. Note, this method doesn’t benefit from the nice font scaling features of the saveas and print. This approach assumes the im variable above still exists.

imagesc(im); colormap gray;

% Set the border color to white
set(h,'Color',[1 1 1]);

% Get the image in the figure
frame = getframe(gcf);
imout = frame.cdata;

% on OS X, the stretch window image 
% appears in the bottom right corner 
% of the image.  Remove it. 
imout = imout(10:end-9,10:end-9,:);

% Write the image out to a lossless tif
imwrite(imout,'test.tif','tif','Compression','none')

You could then convert the tifs to pdf files as above. The quality of the figure will depend on the figure size. In most cases, I wouldn’t use this second approach as saveas handles the fonts nicely. Using getframe is meant only as a workaround to the true problem with saveas.