saveas to pdf but get a blank

Hi,

I want to draw a 2-D curve with a gradient color and I found a tutorial from: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31685078/change-color-of-2d-plot-line-depending-on-3rd-value . It works but I found I can not save the figure to pdf (I will get a blank).

The following is the code copy from the tutorial and tha last two lines is my code to save the figure:

figure;
n = 100;
x = linspace(-10,10,n); y = x.^2;
p = plot(x,y,'r', 'LineWidth',5);

%// modified jet-colormap
cd = [uint8(jet(n)*255) uint8(ones(n,1))].'; %'

drawnow
set(p.Edge, 'ColorBinding','interpolated', 'ColorData',cd)

%save figure
saveas(gcf,['test_V4.tiff'])
saveas(gcf,['test_V4.pdf'])

Any ideas of how to approach this? I did not use surface function because It looks strange in the curved turns after zoom out.

[Luca Ferro]

have you tried to pass it the figure handle instead of the gcf handle?

saveas(p,['test_V4.pdf'])

[Yuqing_noob]

Hi, thanks for helping. I tried saveas(p,['test_V4.pdf']) but also get a blank. I also tried

h = figure;
%other subplotplots without drawnow
saveas(h,['test_V4.pdf'])

However, other plots are all stored in the pdf :( I am not sure how drawnow updated.

[Anton Kogios]

Interesting problem which I couldn't solve - the source of the issue seems to be changing the ColorBinding and exporting as a vectorised graphic.

Is a high-resolution image good enough for you? It's not vectorised but:

exportgraphics(h,'test_V4.pdf','ContentType','image','Resolution',600)

[Yuqing_noob]

Hi Anton, thanks! Your are right, exportgraphics is a useful function. Currently I saved the figure in this way, and it works well! But I think a vectorised graphic is what I need. haha I think I can always use for loop to plot the gradient color if I can not solve this problem.

Answer 1

[Raghunathraju]

Hi Yuqing,

I understand that you are unable to save the figure to pdf using ‘saveas’ option. Instead, you can try print option or Ctrl+p to print the figure and save it as PDF.

[Anton Kogios]

I don't think that answers the question given that it won't be vectorised.