FIG files format

18 Responses

1. 
   Jos von Asmuth December 23, 2010 at 07:55 Reply

   Hi Yair,

   Thanks again. Perhaps it is a simple issue, but do you happen to know how to, once loaded, create a gui or figure out of such a structure? It could be helpfull for automaticcally generating GUI’s.

   Kind regards,
   Jos

• 
  Yair Altman December 23, 2010 at 10:51 Reply

  @Jos – You can use the struct2handle function for this. I will explain its usage next week. Of course, you can always use hgload on the original FIG filename.

2. 
   Volkmar Glauche December 25, 2010 at 00:02 Reply

   I am using this feature to “repair” GUI figures created with some versions of guide. Some versions of guide store callbacks as function handles in a way that is not compatible with all versions of MATLAB I have to work with (R14SP3 onwards). I parse the function handles and replace them with a callback string (if possible).
   Also, in conjunction with gencode this is useful to read and modify the MATLAB code of a saved figure.

   Best,

   Volkmar

3. 
   Robin Lundberg December 17, 2014 at 08:29 Reply

   Trying this in matlab 2014b still opens the gui (sometimes).
   When you load a gui you get

   >>figData = load('guiPostProcessing.fig', '-mat') figData = hgS_070000: [1x1 struct] hgM_070000: [1x1 struct]

   >>figData = load('guiPostProcessing.fig', '-mat') figData = hgS_070000: [1x1 struct] hgM_070000: [1x1 struct]

   And this might open the figure. To prevent this I did this instead and it seems to work fine

   >> figData = load('guiPostProcessing.fig', '-mat', 'hgS_070000') figData = hgS_070000: [1x1 struct]

   >> figData = load('guiPostProcessing.fig', '-mat', 'hgS_070000') figData = hgS_070000: [1x1 struct]

4. 
   Mariam July 27, 2015 at 23:13 Reply

   Hi,

   I have used above following command to load the attributes of figures

   d = load('testFig.fig','-mat')

   d = load('testFig.fig','-mat')

   and then changed those attributes. I want to know how could I apply new attributes to my figure or how can I save variable ‘d’ into .fig format. Please reply.

   Regards,
   Mariam

• 
  Yair Altman July 28, 2015 at 01:07 Reply

  @Mariam – you can simply use the save command to save your modified d struct back into the *.fig file, and then open this FIG file normally:

  save('testFig.fig','d','-mat'); % save modified d struct testFig; % open figure

  save('testFig.fig','d','-mat'); % save modified d struct testFig; % open figure

• 
  Mariam July 28, 2015 at 05:19

  I already tried this and this the error I am getting

  >> save('C:UsersMariamDesktopfitted responseatlas masksIPS_1.fig','s','-mat') >> open('C:UsersMariamDesktopfitted responseatlas masksIPS_1.fig') ??? Error using ==> open at 163 Invalid Figure file format

  >> save('C:UsersMariamDesktopfitted responseatlas masksIPS_1.fig','s','-mat') >> open('C:UsersMariamDesktopfitted responseatlas masksIPS_1.fig') ??? Error using ==> open at 163 Invalid Figure file format

• 
  Yair Altman July 28, 2015 at 05:23

  @Mariam – You probably updated your s data-struct incorrectly

• 
  Mariam July 28, 2015 at 20:53

  I tried it without making any changes to ‘s’. Just loading it

  s = load('C:UsersMariamDesktopfitted responseatlas masksIPS.fig','-mat');

  s = load('C:UsersMariamDesktopfitted responseatlas masksIPS.fig','-mat');

  and re-saving it

  save('testFig.fig','s','-mat'); % save modified d struct

  save('testFig.fig','s','-mat'); % save modified d struct

  However the effect remains it

  open('testFig.fig') ??? Error using ==> open at 163 Invalid Figure file format.

  open('testFig.fig') ??? Error using ==> open at 163 Invalid Figure file format.

• 
  Yair Altman July 29, 2015 at 01:12

  @Mariam – the save command save the data including the variable name as top-level struct field. You should keep the same top-level field-name as used by the FIG format (hgS_070000 or hgM_070000):

  s = load('IPS.fig','-mat'); hgS_070000 = s.hgS_070000;   % modify hgS_070000   save('IPS.fig','hgS_070000','-mat');

  s = load('IPS.fig','-mat'); hgS_070000 = s.hgS_070000; % modify hgS_070000 save('IPS.fig','hgS_070000','-mat');

• 
  Martin July 29, 2015 at 03:53 Reply

  @Mariam – you can also use the -struct flag of the save function, if you want to modify the struct s directly without going through another temporary variable:

  save('testFig.fig', '-struct', 's', '-mat');

  save('testFig.fig', '-struct', 's', '-mat');

  That way the field names of the struct s are treated as the variable names to be saved to the file.

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6. 
   Varshini Guddanti June 16, 2016 at 04:54 Reply

   Can the ‘load’ method convert the figure into a matrix to do some operations later?

• 
  Yair Altman June 16, 2016 at 09:32 Reply

  @Varshini – load() simply returns a Matlab struct. You can then process and convert this struct in your Matlab code in whichever way that you wish.

7. 
   ElGalloGringo July 21, 2016 at 20:18 Reply

   I am trying to write my own script to parse this struct data and generate a figure from a subset of the children handles. One weird thing I am running into is that even though in the struct from the FIG file the title, xlabel, and ylabel show up as children of the axes, when the FIG file is loaded with openfig, those children handles get assigned to the ‘title’, ‘xlabel’, and ‘ylabel’ properties of the axes. I can’t figure out how Matlab is determining that these children handles are special and shouldn’t just be added as children.

   Any thoughts?

• 
  Malcolm Lidierth July 24, 2016 at 00:24 Reply

  Not sure why you think it should not. Any MATLAB OOP class can define custom saveobj and loadobj methods to deal with the serialisation/deserialization process.

  Not your question but maybe relevant to what you are doing: an undocumented (I think) feature of MATLAB is that constructors will accept a structure on input. So

  s.Name='This is my figure'; h=figure(s);

  s.Name='This is my figure'; h=figure(s);

  will give you a figure with the specified Name and other properties set to their default values. All HG objects seem to comply with this. Add properties as required to s.

8. 
   E. LeFort June 5, 2017 at 19:00 Reply

   Hello, great post. I want to share an issue and hopefully receive some help in defining the solution. Fist I derived a plot using the risetime function in matlab. This plot contains all types of information I would like to extract. Specifically the upper cross time which is marked with a red “x” by default.

   I performed the following code:

   fig.hgS_070000.children.children.properties

   fig.hgS_070000.children.children.properties

   However, when ran I received the following error:

   "Expected one output from a curly brace or dot indexing expression, but there were 2 results."

   "Expected one output from a curly brace or dot indexing expression, but there were 2 results."

   Is there a way to access this curly brace Information? I suspect this is an indexing issue however I have no idea how to access it.

   Any help is greatly appreciated.

• 
  Yair Altman June 5, 2017 at 19:08 Reply

  There are probably multiple children, so accessing children.children and/or children.properties results in an understandable error. You can try to access individual children using indexing, for example: fig.hgS_070000.children(1).children(1).properties

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