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I recommend the following tips for the best possible reproduction of High-quality figures. I divided this article into two parts. The first part is how to produce publication standard figures contains lines. The second part is talking about how to render image files for publications. I normally save these two settings in Matlab so that I can save time entering these settings each time in the future.

Line Style Based Figures

This is the most common type we seen in scientific articles,

These are the settings use:

If we zoom in to 300% and 1200%, it can be seen that the figure is indeed rendered as vector

File size Comparison

Image Style Based Figures

If it is an image file the the above settings are not recommended. This is the settings I use for this kind of purpose:

As can be seen from the screenshot below, the Setting A – line style settings are not suitable for such kind of graph. However using Setting B, it produces very nice graph.

File size Comparison

Extra Reading

EMF Files

Enhanced Metafiles (EMF) are vector files similar in nature to Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), capable of producing near publication-quality graphics. EMF is an excellent format to use if you plan to import your image into a Microsoft application and want the flexibility to edit and resize your image once it has been imported. It is the only supported MATLAB vector format you can edit from within a Microsoft application. (Your editing ability is limited. For the best results, do all your editing in Microsoft.)

A drawback of using EMF files is that they are generally only supported by Windows based applications.

EPS Files

The Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) vector format is the most reliable and consistent file format that MATLAB printing and export supports. It is widely recognized in desktop publishing and word processing packages on both UNIX and Windows platforms. EPS is the only MATLAB supported export format that can produce CMYK output. (PostScript printer drivers also support this feature.)

This format is your best choice for producing publication-quality graphics. It might not be appropriate for figures containing interpolated shading because it creates a very large file that is difficult to print. For such figures, use the TIFF format with a high-resolution setting. For more information about format choices, see Choosing Bitmap or Vector Graphic Output.

When imported into Microsoft applications, an EPS file does not display unless you add a TIFF preview image to it.

You cannot edit figures when using EPS files in Microsoft applications; they can only be annotated.

Note: The best vector format to use with Microsoft applications is EMF.

EPS format has limited font support. When you export a graphic to the EPS file format, ino attempt is made to determine whether the fonts you have used in your axes text objects are supported by the EPS format. Unsupported fonts are replaced with Courier.

Creating a Preview Image

You cannot create TIFF preview images using the graphical user interface. Use the print command with the -tiff switch. For example, to create an EPS Level 2 image with TIFF preview in file myfile.eps, type

print -depsc2 -tiff myfile.eps

TIFF Files

The Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) is a very widely used bitmap format and can produce publication-quality graphics if you use a high-resolution setting (such as 200 or 300 dpi).

TIFF is a good format to choose if you are not sure what formats your target application supports, or if you want to import the graphic into more than one application without having to export it to several different formats. It can also be imported into most image-processing applications and converted to other formats, if necessary.