High quality graphics for Latex documents: The Matlab route

Gnuplot is designed to work with LaTeX. If you want a unified appearance, with textual elements on the graph typeset by TeX, then that workflow is built-in to gnuplot.<p>You can also use TikZ to call gnuplot from within the LaTeX document, or generate TikZ code from within gnuplot.<p>A very brief introduction:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;628537&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;628537&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve historically just used matplotlib and it&#x27;s TeX-based text renderer for labels. Output PDF, includegraphics in a latex document. Works fine, text looks great. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;matplotlib.org&#x2F;users&#x2F;usetex.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;matplotlib.org&#x2F;users&#x2F;usetex.html</a>

&gt; <i>But your nice professional looking documents can be ruined because you insert the wrong type of figures.</i><p>Example A of the wrong type of figure for any possible context: 3-dimensional pie charts.

R can output Tikz code. Probably the best option for statistics-related work.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.texample.net&#x2F;tikz&#x2F;examples&#x2F;tikzdevice-demo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.texample.net&#x2F;tikz&#x2F;examples&#x2F;tikzdevice-demo&#x2F;</a>

If you&#x27;re not specifically looking for Computer Modern fonts in your figures but just want vector graphic WYSIWYG exports with your pick of font (beyond what Matlab renders natively), my Matlab figure export tool works well:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;djoshea&#x2F;matlab-save-figure" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;djoshea&#x2F;matlab-save-figure</a>

I found matlabl2tikz to be superior to plot2latex. I did my honours thesis with plot2LaTeX+inkscape and my PhD one with a matlab2tikz, so I&#x27;ve had a fair experience with both.<p>I have created some high quality, complex plots out through matlabl2tikz with no problem. I haven&#x27;t had the issues the author notes and I&#x27;d suggest they file a bug report. The m2t community is active and friendly.<p>The other bonus of m2t is you can edit the files in PGFplots, which is a powerful and complete language&#x2F;library. For my use case, it was important that my plots be repeatable, so manually doing it with Inkscape would be tedious. Having easily editable source code allowed me to write scripts to filter the output to what I needed.<p>The one problem I did find is that pgfplots can be quite slow. This isn&#x27;t m2t&#x27;s fault though and can be overcome with TikZ&#x27;s cache system.<p>Disclosure: I wrote the path simplification in matlab2tikz, but nothing else.

Maybe it&#x27;s just me, but why can&#x27;t Matlab just use the Latex fonts in an EPS, and output that EPS as a single file? That sounds like a more robust and less convoluted solution.

I have taken to using PowerPoint to create the actual charts. Edit them and make them look pretty. Then export as EMF, convert to EPS (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.bu.edu&#x2F;~reyzin&#x2F;pictips.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.bu.edu&#x2F;~reyzin&#x2F;pictips.html</a>) and use the EPS in the Tex document.<p>Its a very manual process though, but I think the graphics that come out of it seem to be nicer than Matplotlib, and Matlab can do. Am I crazy, or should I really consider something like this?

In Mathematica, Export[expr,&quot;PDF&quot;], Export[expr, &quot;SVG&quot;], and Export[expr,&quot;LaTeX&quot;] for math expressions.

I started working on a Matlab command to export plotted data as Metapost paths, and to generate a script that draws the plot. The idea being that you would edit the script to get the style you wanted.<p>The proof of concept worked well for line and contour plots, but my thesis got in the way of completing this.

Does anyone know of an equivalent solution for R&#x2F;ggplot? I feel sad labelling my plots with R&#x27;s fonts and equation formatting, but haven&#x27;t found an alternative.

I wonder if there is a similar guide for Scilab.