Gridlines do not show in xregion/yregion when exporting to pdf

I have a plot showing a shaded region using the xregion command. The plot has grid lines showing and on the screen everything looks as it should. However, if I export this figure to a pdf (vector graphics), then the gridlines within the xregion area disappear.

I don't want to revert to using raster graphics for these plots -- the vector graphics are both smaller and look way better in my documents.

I could brute force this by manually drawing in all the gridlines and putting them on top, but this defeats the point of having a gridlines feature in the plots.

Is there a way to change a property in either xregion or gridlines to allow them to be seen in vector graphics output?

[Mike Croucher]

Could you supply some code that reproduces the kind of plot you mean along with the faulty pdf please?

Answer 1

[Umang Pandey]

Hi,

From what I understand, you are trying to export your plot having a 1-D filled region to a PDF with vector graphics, however, in the process, the grid lines in the shaded region disappear.

I tried doing the same for an example from the xregion documentation page and was able to export my plot to a PDF with vector graphics. You can try referring to the following code and retry with your code:

% An example from xregion documentation page
x = -10:0.25:10;
y = x.^2;
plot(x,y);
xregion(-5,5);

% Making the grids appear on the plot
grid;
ax = gca;

% Exporting the plot as vector pdf
exportgraphics(ax,'1.pdf','ContentType','vector');

Hope this helps!

Best,

Umang

[ET]

Thanks, this does indeed work. In my original case I was using export_fig (v3.05) and the 'painters' renderer. I think it was the issue was that doing it this way, the transparency (facealpa) of graphical objects don't work and hence the gridlines disappeared. I was able to use the exportgraphics and it did work correctly.