Question

I’d like to create a PDF out of my matlab m-function. The PDF should contain some text information which I want to style a bit and one image (which is previously generated as figure). Is there any way? The only thing I found is publish to publish source-code. The only alternative I could think off was to programm the texts into the figure window and than export the whole figure to pdf. Perhaps there’s a better way to do it?
Thanks!

Answer 1

I would recommend generating your figure with Matlab, outputting it to eps, then converting the figure to pdf using epstopdf. Then embed your figure in a latex document and generate a pdf with pdflatex.

I know this sounds like an incredibly roundabout way of doing it, but

1. This is the way I’ve come to do it after years of experience and it always gives me the best results
2. Every one of my colleagues does it this way for the same reason
3. The results will be completely reproducible
4. You’re using Matlab to do what it’s good at (making scientific figures) and latex to do what it’s good at (formatting documents)

The Matlab code to make the eps of the figure would be like this (supposing your figure is figure 1):

print -depsc2 -f1 -loose my_fig.eps

You could pretty easily write a latex template that uses my_fig.pdf and then run everything from your Matlab using bangouts:

!epstopdf my_fig
!pdflatex mydoc.tex