Saving plot vs. contour figures as pdf

I am saving plot and contour figures in MATLAB R2018b as pdf using saveas(gcf,'filename.pdf') for both.

However, the contour figures come out with much higher resolution than the plot figures.

See the screen shot below: the pdf made from a contour figure is on the left, while the pdf made from a plot figure is on the right. This is an issue when I want to edit the figures in Illustrator because I am not able to edit or select any of the features in the pdf made from the plot figure.

Any suggestions on how I can improve the resolution of the pdf plot figs?

Answer 1

[Vinai Datta Thatiparthi]

Hey Arianne!

I tried to reproduce the issue that you describe – I tried to plot a contour figure and a plot figure on R18b and saved them separately to .pdf format using the saveas function and used the Adobe Acrobat tool to view the results, and I’m not noticing any discrepancy - both the figures are clear and are at similar resolution.

As a workaround, consider altering the PaperPosition and PaperPositionMode parameters to control the size of the output. Also, the saveas function uses a resolution of 150 DPI by default, and in order to get results that are more consistent with how your figure looks, refer to this link here on how to save the figure at a specific size and resolution.

Hope this helps!

[Arianne Petley-Ragan]

Thanks for your answer Vinai.

I ended up figuring out my problem: I was plotting 100x100 matrix vs. 1x100 matrix which created a figure with a much larger size and lower resolution than usual.

Thanks anyways!