Extended ASCII character in MATLAB plot label/title

Question

I need to put word "naïve" on a plot, and save it as PNG and PDF. Sometime it's in a title, or in tick label. Whatever I've tried I always get right arrow symbol (png) or empty space (pdf) instead of the ï character.

I've looked into functions native2unicode and unicode2native, but they seems to be only for file input/output.

I cannot believe this task is so difficult in MATLAB.

I'm using MATLAB 2012b undier Windows 7.

The symbol ï has ascii code 0239, or hex 0xEF. MATLAB shows it in console if it's entered with Alt-0239, but displays as empty square.

disp(ï) example

MATLAB returns 26 as character's code:

>> int32('Naïve')
ans =
          78          97          26         118         101

This symbol isn't present in MATLAB's TeX Character Sequence Table.

Which OS / Matlab combination do you have? Using ï in plot titles and calling disp('ï') works just fine for me in R2013a on OSX 10.8.3. Is the font you are using able display the character properly in other applications? — erikced
I think the OP's problem is that the displayed character isn't preserved when the plot is converted to .png or .pdf - not that he can't show it in a plot. In other words - it is in the conversion (I imagine using a saveas(gcf, 'mydir/myFile.png') type of stat ement) that things go wrong. @yuk - can you give a complete code sample to reproduce your problem? — Floris
@Floris: No, I actually cannot show this character on the figure in MATLAB itself. Saving it to either png or pdf does not make a difference. — yuk

DanielTheRocketMan DanielTheRocketMan · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-25T21:31:41

This must work:

X=rand(10,1)
Y=rand(10,1)
plot(X,Y)
title('na\"{i}ve','interpreter','latex');

If you need you can also change font and size , etc.

By the way, take a look at

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Special_Characters

Extended ASCII character in MATLAB plot label/title

1 Answers