preplot-postplot

Easily make beautiful (control) plots in Matlab by avoiding repetitive code. The basic idea is simple:

preplot();
plot(1:10)
postplot();

From here on it is just customization:

colors = [0.15, 0.34, 0.43;
    0.42, 0.76, 0.61];
[f, axs] = preplot(2, 1, 'sharex', 'all', 'interpreter', 'latex', ...
    'colororder', colors);

x = linspace(0, 5, 1e5);
plot(axs(1), x, [sin(x); cos(x)])
plot(axs(2), x, [log10(x); log(x)])
ylabel(axs(1), '$\alpha$')
ylabel(axs(2), '$\beta$')
xlabel(axs(2), 'Time (s)')

postplot(f, 'Images/test.pdf', 'width', 5, 'figSizeUnits', 'inches', ...
    'aspectRatio', 1.5, 'fontSize', 16, 'legendFontSize', 14, ...
    'lineWidth', 3);
postplot(f, 'Images/test2.pdf', 'width', 10, 'figSizeUnits', 'inches', ...
    'aspectRatio', 1.5, 'fontSize', 20, 'legendFontSize', 16, ...
    'lineWidth', 5);

Here, preplot produces a 2x1 figure where only the bottom figure will have an xTickLabel and the x limits and ticks will be shared. Furthermore, all text is interpreted by Latex. Then, two calls to postplot both save a figure (nice if you need the same figure in two different sizes, e.g. a paper and a presentation). Both specify the size, fontsize, and linewidth and saves the figure in the 'Images' folder (which will be created if it did not yet exist).

For more examples, see examples.m and for all the options see the documentation of preplot and postplot.

Using it in your project

There are of course multiple ways to integrate this into your own project. The method that I like is to add it as a git submodule to an existing repository. This way your different projects can have different versions of this toolbox so that old projects won't be affected by breaking changes to this toolbox.

Limitations

• It does not work well together with plots from Matlab's Control Toolbox because those plots (e.g. bode) change a lot of the figure properties internally, so this repo also includes some custom control toolbox plots (e.g. mbode).
• When initializing all the axes with preplot, some properties get locked in. So you either need to set them before plotting or adjust preplot so that it doesn't set these properties. Example: loglog() does not work with preplot unless you set preplot('hold', 'off'), alternatively, you can use preplot('XScale', 'log', 'YScale', 'log') and then just use plot to plot on a logarithmic axis.

Contributing

This is just a little project of mine but it would be cool to make it work for more people. If you encounter issues or use cases that are not supported yet, or have an idea how to make it better, just contact me or file an issue or pull request on GitHub.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.