Very weird bug(?) on latex interpreter

I include a code snippet which colors underneath a sine curve. There is a ylabel with the latex interpreter turned on. Changing the number of patches (from N = 100 to N = 1000) seems to affect the resolution of the axis label. Does anybody know what's going on? Please see the images below for the good label and the messed up one:

http://img406.imageshack.us/img406/6758/screenshot20111109at101m.png http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/8816/screenshot20111109at101a.png

The code is

figure(1); 
clf(1);

N = 100;
x = linspace(0, 2*pi, N);
f = sin(x);
g = 0*f;

verts = [x(:), f(:); x(:) g(:)];
q = (1:N-1)';
faces = [q, q+1, q+N+1, q+N];
p = patch('Faces', faces, 'Vertices', verts, ...
          'FaceVertexCData', [f(:); f(:)], ...
          'FaceColor', 'interp', 'EdgeColor', 'none');
ylabel(['$N = ' num2str(N) '$'], 'FontSize', 18, 'interpreter', 'latex');

Answer 1

[Jan]

This is a problem with your OpenGL-driver. For large data sets the renderer is automatically set to OpenGL, but with Painters the graphics are ok. If you set the renderer manually, it is not changed automatically:

figure('Renderer', 'Painters');
...

The problems for OpenGL might be solved by updating the driver of the graphics card, or by using a software renderer:

opengl software

For more details see help opengl.

[Theo]

The painters renderer does not seem to fix the end result in the sense that any outputted figures still have a bad ylabel. If you add to the code I wrote in the first post with the line "set(gcf, 'Renderer', 'Painters')", the figure in the output window is fine, but once you output with "print('-dpng', 'test.png')" you'll see that the ylabel does not render.

Do print commands automatically use OpenGL?

[Titus Edelhofer]

Try to add parameter "-painters" while printing.

[Theo]

Yes, Titus, this does the trick. It is a somewhat unsatisfactory workaround (as painters graphics might not suffice), but I'll accept it. Thanks all.