Printing and Exporting Figures with MATLAB

HPGL Drivers

MATLAB provides HPGL support for the HP 7475A plotter and fully compatible plotters. HPGL files can also be imported into documents of other applications, such as Microsoft Word.

The HPGL driver cannot do background fills. Therefore, you should ensure that your figure is set to print with a white background (the default), and that any lines and text in your figure will be drawn in a color dark enough to be discerned on a white background. For more information about background color, see Retaining Background Colors.

Color Selection

The HP 7475A plotter supports six pens, none of which can be white. If MATLAB tries to draw in white while rendering in HPGL mode, the driver ignores all drawing commands until a different color is chosen.

Pen 1, which is assumed to be black, is used for drawing axes. The remaining pens are used for the first five colors specified in the ColorOrder property of the current axes object. If ColorOrder specifies fewer than five colors, the unspecified pens are not used.

For Simulink systems, which ordinarily use a maximum of eight colors, the six pens available on the plotter are assumed to be:

• Pen 1: black
• Pen 2: red
• Pen 3: green
• Pen 4: blue
• Pen 5: cyan
• Pen 6: magenta

If you attempt to draw a MATLAB object containing a color that is not a known pen color, the driver chooses the nearest approximation to the unlisted color.

Limitations

The HPGL driver has these limitations:

• Display colors and plotted colors sometimes differ.
• Areas (faces on mesh and surface plots, patches, blocks, and arrowheads) are not filled.
• There is no hidden line or surface removal.
• Text is printed in the plotter's default font.
• Line width is determined by pen width.
• Images and UI controls cannot be plotted.
• Interpolated edge lines between two vertices are drawn with the pen whose color best matches the average color of the two vertices.
• Figures cannot be rendered using Z-buffer or OpenGL; this driver always uses the Painter's algorithm.

Ghostscript Drivers

Printing to a File