Figure saved to PDF with wrong font when using special characters.

Hello everyone!

I'm currently generating some plots for my thesis. I set figure properties inside the code and then print it with the print function. It looks something like this:

figure(PaperSize=[xdim ydim],PaperUnits="inches",PaperPosition=[0 0 xdim ydim]);

%plotting and plot settings

print(name,'-dpdf')

Recently I noticed I need to change the font in my figures to match the one I use in my thesis. I used fontname function for that. First, using a custom font didn't work so I opted for Times New Roman as it's the closest one to the font I'm using right now. Now Times New Roman works but only when I don't use special characters from my native language which is polish. So when I name xaxis with something like

xlabel(Moc wejściowa [dB])

it gets printed to pdf in default font which I don't want. If I exclude the "ś" character, it prints in Times New Roman just fine.

So far I haven't been successful with battling this issue. I tried using fontname with figure and gca as targets and printing using "Microsoft to PDF Printer" as a print option.

Problem does not appear when printing to png. However, I really need vector graphics and since it's easiest for me to use and I already made a lot of figures this way I really want to stay with pdf.

I appreciate your help.

Thank you!

Answer 1

[Kanishk]

Hi @Andrzej,

I reproduced the issue of the “Times New Roman” font not working with special characters.

I found a workaround by using ‘exportgraphics’ and ‘ContentType’ property.

font = 'Times New Roman'; 
set(gca, 'FontName', font); 
title('Moc wejściowa [dB]', 'FontName', font); 
xlabel('Moc wejściowa [dB]', 'FontName', font); 
ylabel('Y-axis Label', 'FontName', font); 
exportgraphics(gca, 'figure_name.pdf', 'ContentType', 'vector'); 

To learn more, please follow this official MATLAB Documentation for ‘exportgraphics’.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2024a/matlab/ref/exportgraphics.html

Hope this helps!!

Thanks