Why are we having so much trouble with batch plotting on Linux?

Hi everybody, this has has been troubling us for a while, and it sure would be nice to solve!

We are generating JPEG and SVG files from matlab (SVG via fprintf statements only) which we have the co-registrations of the image dimensions worked out beautifully. The trouble is that Matlab takes its own iniative and scales the jpeg plot however it sees fit when the jobs are run in batch mode.

We have a parallel farm that runs thousands of these jobs daily on Ubuntu 10.04, and we get inconsistent results. The plots are cropped or sometimes created at 640x480.

Clues:

1. Works fine from interactive shell.

2. The PERL daemon we use spawns non-interactive jobs (and X DISPLAY variable is not set). Seems to break regardless of whether TERM is 'unknown' or 'xterm'

3. The support docs that we have been able to find at Mathworks, etc. are silent as to what happens if the DISPLAY variable is not set, but it seems important.

4. We are generally calling Matlab thus:

matlab -logfile $MATLAB_LOG_FILE -nosplash -nodesktop -r "pulseWalker( '$1','$CHANNEL','$DETECTOR' );exit;"

Surely this is not new! Any clues?

Thanks a lot!!!

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

http://matlab.wikia.com/wiki/FAQ#How_do_I_save_my_figure.2C_axes.2C_or_image.3F_I.27m_having_trouble_with_the_built_in_MATLAB_functions.