Working with large Matlab figures in Word

I would like to insert a scatterplot of data into a MS Word file. There are roughly 200 thousand points on the figure, so when I save the figure as an EMF the file is over 50MB in size. What is my best option for inserting figures like this in Word? I want to keep my Word doc to a manageable size. I have tried reducing my dpi but it does not help. Any tips or pointers would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

[Patrick Kalita]

With that many points, it is probably advisable to use a bitmap format, rather than EMF. I would think that exporting the figure as a PNG-file with a reasonable high resolution (perhaps 200dpi) should give you acceptable quality:

print -dpng -r200 exported.pdng

[Braden]

Okay, thanks Patrick. I tried that and it does work well. Is there any way to down size EMF files or is that just the nature of the vector format? High quality figures for smaller amounts of data?

[Patrick Kalita]

Sorry, no, I'm not aware of any way to "compress" an EMF file. That's just the way vector format file size scales -- when there are lots of objects to represent it has to include information about *all* of them.

Answer 2

[Sean de Wolski]

I know it sounds lame, but I usually just use a screenshot.

[Paulo Silva]

:) same here

[Braden]

Yeah I don't think that would fly for a thesis.

[Paulo Silva]

The figures just show the results of your work, they will lose quality when you print them anyway. The main thing you should put into the thesis is how to get the same figures and explain them.