Surf plot as .svg file with many grid lines too dark

Hi Matlab-Community,

I want to insert a surf plot into my thesis latex document with about 60x85 data points. Tikz creates too large files and runs into problems - so that is not an option.

A nice (time-consuming) alternative is to export the plot as .svg, open it in inkscape, add all text and tiks manually and save as pdf_tex. That way, I get a nice vector graphic with document compatible text without matlab2tikz. At least I thought...

Here is my problem:

The plot is too dark due to the many edge lines. Redrawing fewer edges with plot3 does not work for the "60"-direction, since I want to keep the bounding edge lines and even spacing (59 is a prime number and cannot be divided evenly). It seems, that I can't change the linewidth of the full 60x85 plot3 redrawn edges, to decrease the darkening effect. I guess I could compute intermediate edge values between my given data points with (bi-)splines or linear interpolation, but there must be another way. Redoing the simulation on which the surface is based is overkill and takes too long.

Illuminating the plot with a light feature is not an option, since I need the Painters renderer for the .svg export and the two of them are not compatible. Brightening with briten does work but not well enough.

Is there anything, that I'm missing? Do you have any suggestions? Thank you so much in advance!

Answer 1

[darova]

What about this approach?

clc,clear

[x,y,z] = peaks(59);
ii = 1:5:size(x,1);
jj = 1:5:size(x,2);

surf(x,y,z,'edgecolor','none')
surface(x(ii,jj),y(ii,jj),z(ii,jj),'facecolor','none')
view(45,45)

[Simon Bäuerle]

Thank you for your reply. I didn't knew the combination of surf and surface - nice :-) ! However, I would like to keep the edge lines on the outer edges. Adding them in your example would result in uneven spacing between the lines. At that point I should mention, that the surface plots display the results of a fluid flow simulation and edges coincide with the underlying discretization. I don't want to suggest uneven spacing in the simulation that way. I know its nitpicking - but thats kind of the whole theme of my thesis anyway :-)

[darova]

Here is a solution

clc,clear

[x,y,z] = peaks(59);
ii = round( linspace(1,size(x,1),20) );
jj = round( linspace(1,size(x,2),20) );

surf(x,y,z,'edgecolor','none')
surface(x(ii,jj),y(ii,jj),z(ii,jj),'facecolor','none')
view(45,45)

[Simon Bäuerle]

Nice! The edges are not spaced evenly that ways - but thats not noticable when using only a few edges. Next problem: painters renderer exports white lines where the original edges have been - independent of edgecolor setting (none, flat, interp). Opengl doesn't, but cannot export vectorgraphic surfaces. Do you have a solution?

[darova]

It's impossible. Do you have a picture?

[Simon Bäuerle]

Sure. The lines can be seen espcially good on the left surface plot in the blue area.

[darova]

try

opengl software