Minimalist MATLAB Template for Scientific Figures

May 28, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

This repository contains a MATLAB template to create scientific figures. The template carefully follows best practices for data visualization.

Documentation

The template is documented at https://pascalmichaillat.org/d/.

Illustration

The figures produced by the template can be viewed at https://pascalmichaillat.org/d.pdf.

Usage

  • Clone the repository to your local machine.
  • Open MATLAB and set the repository as the current folder.
  • Run publish('figures.m') in MATLAB to generate an HTML page at html/figures.html. The page can be opened in any web browser. It displays the MATLAB code and its output. This is a good way to see the figures produced by the template, and to experiment.
  • Use any part of the template defined in figures.m to produce figures for your project.
  • On a Mac, the figures can easily be annotated with Keynote. This procedure is more user-friendly and more flexible than directly annotating the figures in MATLAB. The Keynote file figures.key illustrates how to annotate the figures. The main step is to insert the image produced by MATLAB as a background to the slide using Image Fill with the option Scale to Fill.
  • The figures.key file can then be exported as a PDF file so the figures can be used elsewhere. The figures.pdf file is obtained by exporting figures.key.

Software

  • The template was developed using MATLAB R2023B on macOS Sonoma (Apple silicon).
  • Other MATLAB releases and operating systems may require minor adjustments. Please report any issues to help improve compatibility.

License

This repository is licensed under the MIT License.