How to render MATLAB figure legend texts as LaTeX? - matlab

Question

Although I have rendered my legend text with LaTeX in MATLAB as follows
set(myLegend, 'fontsize', 8, 'interpreter','latex', 'Position', [0.67, 0.12, 0.3, 0.01]);
I still feel that the texts are rather different from my main texts. For example, the texts seem so ugly, because the letters are too far apart. Plus, the strikes are so thin.
How can I make them look exactly the same as the caption below?

Answer 1

You can actually export your Matlab figure by using Matlab2tikz. Once you get your Matlab figure, just insert it in your LaTeX file by \input{myfigure.tex}.
Using Matlab2tikz is really easy, as stated in the README file:
The workflow is as follows.
a. Place the matlab2tikz scripts (contents of src/ folder) in a directory
where MATLAB can find it (the current directory, for example).
b. Make sure that your LaTeX installation includes the packages
TikZ (aka PGF, >=2.00) and
Pgfplots (>=1.3).
Generate your plot in MATLAB.
Invoke matlab2tikz by Matlab matlab2tikz(); or matlab2tikz('myfile.tex');
The script accepts numerous options; check them out by invoking the help, help matlab2tikz Sometimes, MATLAB makes it hard to create matching LaTeX plots by keeping invisible objects around or stretches the plots too far beyond the bounding box. Use Matlab cleanfigure;matlab2tikz('myfile.tex');` to first clean the figure of unwanted entities, and then convert it to TeX.
Add the contents of myfile.tex into your LaTeX source code; a
convenient way of doing so is to use \input{/path/to/myfile.tex}.
Also make sure that at the header of your document the Pgfplots package
is included
This should be in your .tex file:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
% and optionally (as of Pgfplots 1.3):
\pgfplotsset{compat=newest}
\pgfplotsset{plot coordinates/math parser=false}
\newlength\figureheight
\newlength\figurewidth
\begin{document}
\input{myfile.tex}
\end{document}

Answer 2

This is how I normally embed latex in legends,
l = legend('$\alpha$', '$\dot{\alpha}$', '$x$', '$\dot{x}$');
set(l, 'interpreter', 'latex', 'location', 'northwest', 'FontSize', 15)
For some reason, possibly a bug, it only works when when you set the interpreter via the object's setter.
To do the above caption try,
l = legend('(b) $t=9:00 \Delta t$
set(l, 'interpreter', 'latex')