MATLAB Script to Produce Scientific Figures

This repository contains a MATLAB script to create scientific figures. The script carefully follows data visualization best practices.

Documentation

The script is documented at https://pascalmichaillat.org/d4/.

Features

• The font on the axes and for the annotations is Helvetica.
• Font sizes and line thicknesses are set for comfortable reading once the figures are inserted in pairs in a paper.
• A collection of color palettes is provided, both for qualitative displays and sequential displays. The palettes were created by ColorBrewer.
• The script produces a collection of basic figures with different plot types and different features:
  • Time series plots: single or multiple series, with or without period areas, with or without above-below areas
  • Scatter plots: transparent or not, connected or not, with or without above-below areas
• Figure dimensions are set to minimize the white space around the content.
• The figure aspect ratio is 4:3 so the figure can easily be annotated with a presentation software.
• The figures produced by the script are available in PDF format in the figures folder.
• The file figures.pdf illustrates the output of the MATLAB script after annotations.

Usage

• Clone the repository to your local machine.
• Open the repository with MATLAB.
• Run publish('figures.m') in MATLAB to generate an HTML page at html/figures.html in the repository. The page can be opened in any web browser. It displays the MATLAB code and its output. This is the best way to see the figures produced by the script, and to experiment with the script.
• Use any part of the script defined in figures.m to produce figures for your project.
• On a Mac, the figures can easily be annotated with Keynote. This procedure is more user friendly, and more flexible, than annotating the figures directly in MATLAB. The Keynote file figures.key illustrates how to annotate the figures produced by the script. The main step is to insert the image produced by MATLAB as a background to the slide using Image Fill with the option Scale to Fill.
• The figures.key file can then be exported as a PDF file so the figures can be used elsewhere. The figures.pdf file is obtained by exporting figures.key.

Software

This script was developed on an Apple Silicon Mac with MATLAB R2023B.

License

The content of this repository is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.