Chapter 7 - Producing output

What good is a fancy graphics environment when you cannot make decent output? Therefore matNMR offers a direct printing service from every window. This will print the current view to the default printer as defined in the $matlabroot/toolbox/local/printopt.m file. Furthermore there is the printing menu which provides a GUI interface to the standard MATLAB print command. Basically all options available for this command can be accessed from this window. This will be explained further in paragraph 7.2 just below.

A different way of saving a picture is through the standard MATLAB saveas command. This allows to save the entire figure either as a binary or as an m-file. Addressing this file later will reproduce the entire figure as it was before. Some words on this can be found in paragraph 7.2 below.

Finally paragraph 7.3 explains how to use the clipboard for copying figures into other applications for people that are working with Windows.

A note must be made concerning the fact that MATLAB in general is not WYSIWIG. For more information on this see paragraph 3.8, MATLAB and WYSIWIG.

7.1 Printing menu

The printing menu provides a GUI interface to the standard MATLAB print command. As the use of this routine requires some knowledge on what the MATLAB print command does, please see the MATLAB documentation for more information. The following window is opened:

printing menu


Selection of the appropriate output device and, optionally, other features will change the command line that is displayed in the bottom of the figure window. After the appropriate selection usually a file name is required and this must be written at the end of the print command, separated by a blanc space. Only when using then "-P" option, for direct printing to a printer under UNIX, must the name of the printer device be attached, e.g. -Pvpp_phaser750. Note that any text that is typed into the print command line will be removed again when changing a selection (using the UI-controls).

The specified paper type and orientation override any current setting for the window that needs to be printed. Plots from default matNMR windows should be centered on the printed page. The button "enforce WYSIWYG" tries to obtain what-you-see-is-what-you-get behaviour, i.e. make a plot that looks exactly like the window looks on the screen. In case the absolute size of the window is bigger than the paper size the window will be resized before plotting. As this does not work perfectly in all cases a warning message will be issued. This states that it is better to resize the window by the given amount yourself. Printing the smaller window should then be really WYSIWYG (at least as far as MATLAB allows). For more information see paragraph 3.8, MATLAB and WYSIWIG.

When the print command line is as desired press the "Print" button to execute the command. The figure window is moved into the background and will appear back unchanged when starting the printing menu again.

This menu can also be called from the MATLAB command line by typing "matprint". The routine will assume the current figure as the one to be printed so be sure to make the figure of interest the current figure (for more information on the MATLAB figure command see the MATLAB documentation).

7.2 Saving figures to disk

The MATLAB command saveas provides a means of saving a figure window to disk in a certain format. As this feature is not specially implemented into matNMR please refer to the MATLAB documentation for more information. Note that saving a figure in this way can create very large files!

7.3 Using the clipboard

To copy figures from MATLAB into other applications under Windows requires the standard MATLAB menubar. In general this has been disabled in matNMR because there are quite a few other items that need to be put into the menubars already. Only in the window created after executing the "Copy Figure" command (can be found in the menubar of all matNMR windows, for a graphical example see paragraph 5.2.8, "Copy Figure") will this MATLAB menubar be present. From there objects can be selected and copied using the "Edit" menu.

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