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John F on 11 Jul 2012
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https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/43326-create-figure-without-displaying-it
Answered: Walter Roberson on 14 May 2023
Hi,
I'd like to create a figure and save it in the background without displaying it.
I've heard of setting the "visibility" setting to "off", but the figure window still pops up.
I'd rather just have the figure be created and saved in its specified folder without having to see it.
Any way to do this?
Thanks,
JF
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Answers (5)
Thomas on 11 Jul 2012
Edited: Thomas on 11 Jul 2012
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Something like this?
a=1:4;
f = figure('visible','off');
plot(a)
saveas(f,'newout','fig')
Now to reopen the figure
% to open the figure
openfig('newout.fig','new','visible')
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MA-Winlab on 24 Mar 2019
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Why I am not able to juts click on the saved figure to open it? I was able to view the figure only by using openfig!
Walter Roberson on 24 Mar 2019
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⋮
double-click on a .fig will open it.
Note: .fig that are created by GUIDE will not be able to run their GUI if you open them this way. To launch a GUIDE GUI, you need to execute the .m file.
MA-Winlab on 24 Mar 2019
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I am double clicking on the .fig files but they do not open. Hence I am using the line provided by @Thomas to save the figures!
Derek Rose on 13 Aug 2020
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Edited: Derek Rose on 13 Aug 2020
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It's because the figure is still set to 'visible', 'off' when you save it. If you want it to be visible when you reopen it in MATLAB, then you need to use
a=1:4;
f = figure('visible','off');
plot(a)
%do all other plotting to the figure here before making visible, saving, and closing
set(f, 'visible', 'on');
saveas(f, 'newout', 'fig');
close(f)
I know this seems redundent becuase this will cause it to flash on the screen for an instant while saving, but this is way better in the instance your function is accessing the figure, while visible, over and over again to add new data.
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Luffy on 11 Jul 2012
Edited: Walter Roberson on 31 Oct 2016
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If h = figure;set(h, 'Visible', 'off');
% do ur plotting here
saveas(h,'figure.png');
You will not see a figure popping up,but you can see h in workspace
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Blanca Larraga on 4 Jun 2018
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I still get the figure popping up. I have some subplots within my figure; could this be the reason why? How could I solve it?
Aaron Kaw on 9 Mar 2022
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I have the same questions, except I'm using tiledlayout.
Walter Roberson on 9 Mar 2022
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If you make changes to a figure that is not visible, then depending exactly what you do, the updates might not be completed until you let the figure render by making it visible. For example xlim auto will not update until the axes is made visible which requires that the figure be visible. Therefore making a figure invisible and updating it and saving it without making it visible can result in it not saving updated plots. So you probably want to make the figure visible before saving anyways.
If you do save a figure that is not visible then the visible state will be saved and opening the file will not show you anything unless you asked to override visibility when you open.
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cmmv on 13 Jun 2016
Edited: cmmv on 13 Jun 2016
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What if we create mutiple figure handles first. Then, the current axis (gca) corresponds to the final handle created. Currently, i set the gca using figure(handle);
How then, do we maintain the visibility setting 'off' if needing to call the handles in any order for plotting.
EG:
h1 = figure('doublebuffer','off','Visible','Off');
h2 = figure('doublebuffer','off','Visible','Off'); %gca is now here
set(h1,'Units','pixels','Position',[1 1 850 375]);
figure(h1); %<--- this continues to make h1 "visible"
subplot(1,2,1);
plot(time, data);
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Bart Doekemeijer on 31 Oct 2016
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You will want to do:
set(0,'CurrentFigure',h1);
Aastav Sen on 23 Nov 2020
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Awesome!
This works for me (adding data to a plot within a loop without having Matlab steal the focus so I can work on other things at the same time)! So in a nutshell:
Call before your loop:
fg = figure(1)
But during your loop when you want to update the contents of a figure this requires you to 'grab' the figure and set it to your current figure handle = 'gcf'. You do this using:
set(0,'CurrentFigure',fg);
Note: that if you instead used in you loop:
fg = figure(1)
This would set the 'gcf' to our figure (what we want), but, would also steal the focus (what we don't want)!
Hope this helps.
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Walter Roberson on 14 May 2023
I'd like to create a figure and save it in the background without displaying it.
In MATLAB, creating a figure always makes the figure visible, even if 'visible', 'off' is set. Having 'visible', 'off' at the time of figure creating still makes the figure visible and then immediately turns off visibility -- but it might (or might not) monetarily flash on the screen.
MATLAB's internal graphics system is (for whatever reason) only set up to finalize the values of some internal positions at the time that a figure is made visible, so MATLAB's graphic system strictly needs this.
Furthermore, some changes (especially related to positions and automatic choice of axes boundaries and associated ticks and labels) are postponed when the graphics object is not set to 'visible', 'on', so if you have set a figure to 'visible', 'off' and you make graphics changes, it may be necessary to set the visibility on before you can properly capture the screen or query the properties.
Also, the way to determine how much space some text would take if it were made visible, or the way to automatically wrap text, requires that the associated component be visible. If you are trying to auto-size components (creating an attractive screen layout based upon how much space is needed) then you end up having to create a prototype of the object, having the object flash on the screen, read out its properties, and then deleting the prototype object. (At least for traditional figures; there are newer text-wrapping facilities that perhaps do not need this.)
It is not ideal, but it is what we have to work with.
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Kc Nkurumeh on 14 May 2023
You can keep the figures docked. For me this stops the constant focus stealing, however, some display commands don't work correctly when the figure is docked. For example rotating text.
set(0,'DefaultFigureWindowStyle','normal')
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