Publication quality 2D graphs with less manual effort due to explicit use of dual coordinate systems

Source Code for Biology and Medicine

Daniel A Wagenaar¹ 

[1] Department of Biological Sciences, University of Cincinnati, PO Box 210006, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA

关键词: Matlab;    Typography;    Data plotting;   

Others  :  1139285
DOI  :  10.1186/1751-0473-9-22

 received in 2014-05-29, accepted in 2014-09-18,  发布年份 2014

【 摘 要 】

Creating visually pleasing graphs in data visualization programs such as Matlab is surprisingly challenging. One common problem is that the positions and sizes of non-data elements such as textual annotations must typically be specified in either data coordinates or in absolute paper coordinates, whereas it would be more natural to specify them using a combination of these coordinate systems. I propose a framework in which it is easy to express, e.g., “this label should appear 2 mm to the right of the data point at (3, 2)” or “this arrow should point to the datum at (2, 1) and be 5 mm long.” I describe an algorithm for the correct layout of graphs of arbitrary complexity with automatic axis scaling within this framework. An implementation is provided in the form of a complete 2D plotting package that can be used to produce publication-quality graphs from within Matlab or Octave.

【 授权许可】

   
2014 Wagenaar; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

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