Printing and Exporting Figures with MATLAB

Changing Figure Size and Position

This section describes how to set the size and position of the figure to specific values. Depending on the size and orientation of the paper, changing the size or position of the figure can cause it to print off the edges. For more information, see Relationships Among Settings.

Note    The figure does not resize on the screen. The settings only affect the output. If printing, you can use Print Preview to see how it will look on the page.

Using the Page Setup Dialog Box

1. Select Page Setup from the figure window's File menu and select the Size and Position tab.
2. Make sure that the Use manual size and position is checked and that Units is set appropriately.
3. You can set the width and height of the figure interactively or manually. To set the width and height manually, enter new values in the Width and Height fields or click the arrows to select a new size.

1. The settings shown for Top, Left, Width, and Height are initialized with MATLAB default values. (This is true even if you resized the figure window by dragging its borders.)

4. To set the width and height interactively, use the preview image. Use the mouse to drag the edges of the "sample" figure to the desired size.
   
   
5. If you want the figure resized to fill the paper, click Fill page. Note that Fill page may alter the aspect ratio of your image. To get the maximum figure size without altering the aspect ratio, select Fix aspect ratio.
6. You can set the margins of the figure (offsets from the left and top edges of the paper) interactively or manually. To set the margins manually, enter new values in the Left and Top fields or click the arrows to select a new size.

1. To set the margins interactively, use the preview image. Use the mouse to drag the "sample" figure to a new position.
   
   

7. To center the figure horizontally and vertically on the paper, click Center
8. Click OK.

For detailed information about the Size and Position tab of the Page Setup dialog box, see its context sensitive help by clicking its Help button.

Using MATLAB Commands

To print your figure with a specific size, make sure that the PaperPositionMode property is set to manual (the default). Then set the PaperPosition property to the desired size and position.

The PaperPosition property references a four-element row vector that specifies the position and dimensions of the printed output. The form of the vector is

• [distance_from_left distance_from_bottom width height]
  

where:

• distance_from_left specifies the distance from the left edge of the paper to the left edge of the figure.
• distance_from_bottom specifies the distance from the bottom of the paper to the bottom of the figure.
• width and height specify the figure's width and height.

These are the MATLAB default values for PaperPosition.

• [0.25 2.5 8.0 6.0]
  

This example sets the figure size to a width of 4 and height of 2,

• set(gcf, 'PaperPositionMode', 'manual');
  set(gcf, 'PaperPosition', [2 1 4 2]);
  

with the origin of the figure positioned two units of measure from the left edge of the paper and one unit of measure from the bottom edge of the paper.

Note    PaperPosition specifies a bottom margin, rather than a top margin as Page Setup does. When you set the top margin using Page Setup, MATLAB uses this setting to calculate the bottom margin, and updates the PaperPosition property appropriately.

Changing Default Size or Position

If you always want to print or export your figures at a defined size, set the default values for PaperPosition in your startup.m file. For example, this line sets the default size to [0 0 4 3].

• set(0,'DefaultFigurePaperPosition',[0 0 4 3])
  

If you always want to print or export your figures at the same size as they are on the screen, modify the setting for DefaultFigurePaperPositionMode in your startup.m file as follows

• set(0,'DefaultFigurePaperPositionMode','auto')
  

Size and Position of Printed or Exported Figures

Examples