plot tick justification error in EPS file

On a plot, I have replaced x-ticks with text and then rotated them through 90 degrees. When printing to EPS format (top image), the text is centrally justified and crosses the x-axis. When I print to PNG (bottom image), the text is right justified and does not cross the x-axis. Furthermore, the font in the EPS image is incorrect; it should be Garamond but appears to be Courier New. How can I correct these two issues?

Answer 1

[Kiran Felix Robert]

Hi Benjamin,

This happens because the X axis ticks in the figure are set to 'Auto' and the X axis is rescaled when the figure is resized for exporting.

To avoid this refer the following code snippet to set the X Axis ticks to ‘Manual’

X = 1:5;
Y = X.^2;

f = figure;
plot(X,Y);
ax = gca;
names = {'One';'Two';'Three';'Four';'Five'};

ax.XTick = [1:5]; % Ticks
ax.XTickLabel = names; % Tick Lables
ax.XTickLabelRotation = 90; % Rotation
ax.XTickMode = 'Manual'; % Manual X Ticks Mode
ax.FontName = 'Garamond'; % Font
 
print(f,'png','-dpng','-opengl')
print(f,'eps','-deps','-opengl')

Kiran Felix Robert

[Benjamin Jones]

Hi Kiran,

Thanks very much for your response.

The fix here seems to be the use of the opengl renderer rather than the painters. For example, I cannot replicate my issues by removing the

ax.XTickMode = 'Manual';

command and using the opengl renderer.

However, there is a side-effect. The quality of the opengl EPS image is no better than a PNG image. So if inserted into a PDF docuement, the image is noisy when zoomed. It is not when using the painters renderer, but the alignment is incorrect.

Saving the image as a PDF file has exactly the same issues.

Why is the image quality so poor? Is there a solution?

Thanks again.

[Benjamin Jones]

I have noticed that setting

ax.TickLabelInterpreter = 'latex';
ylabel('some text','interpreter','latex');

both solves the layout and font problems when using the painters renderer.