pdf2pub

An Inkscape extension to format plots for publication (primarily targeted at MATLAB).

Preparing figures for publication is time consuming, even more so if you use MATLAB graphical features to place legends, arrows, normalize colors, etc. This extension is part of a MATLAB+Inkscape workflow in which "raw" plots are imported into Inkscape to be fixed. A similar workflow can be used with other softwares, such as R.

Developed and tested on Inkscape 0.91 with MATLAB r2014b.

Installation

Simply copy pdf2pub.inx and pdf2pub.py to your Inkscape extention folder (something like {inkscape}/share/extensions or .config/inkscape/extensions if you're on Ubuntu) and restart Inkscape.

Usage

The workflow for which this extension was created is as follows:

1. Plot figure in MATLAB. Do not include titles or legends, but do name your axes!

2. Use export_fig to save plot to pdf. For instance,

set(gcf, 'Color', 'w')
export_fig -pdf -q101 -append figures.pdf

3. Import the pdf (e.g., figures.pdf) into Inkscape.

4. Ungroup object completely. Select plot and hit ctrl+shift+g a few times.

5. Run pub2pdf.

Options

pdf2pub differentiates between grid lines, bounding box, and actual plot curves based on their style elements. You must provide enough arguments in the Find bounding box style and Find grid style to identity these elements. For newer MATLAB versions, the stroke (color) is enough. The best way is to select the element and hit ctrl+shift+x to check the XML node of that element.

pdf2pub comes with two default plot formats:

• full gives a figure with a width of approximately 244 pt, which is the usual column width of a two column paper (e.g., in the standard IEEE style)
• half yields a figure with a width of approximately 125 pt, so that you can squeeze two plots side-by-side (again considering the IEEE style)

These default format also make decisions as to plot line, grid, and bounding box styles. You can change these options using the custom option and filling in your preferences in the Custom tab. Settings are pretty much self-explanatory.

TODO

This is still somewhat under development and still hasn't been tested enough. Some things that still need fixing:

• Include some safety checks (right now, if things don't look as they should, the extension will simply fail)
• Fix aspect ratio of closed paths, circles, etc.