Anyways, the trick is to open the resulting .eps file with a text editor and replace cm fonts with Helvetica or whatever you want. For example, change the following lines:

%%IncludeResource: font mwa_cmr10
/mwa_cmr10 /WindowsLatin1Encoding 120 FMSR

with the following:

%%IncludeResource: font Helvetica
/Helvetica /WindowsLatin1Encoding 120 FMSR

I hope this helps to whomever googles this problem.

Have you tried the official route? What does MathWorks tech support have to say about this?

thanks for this post and the interesting additional information in the comments. However, after some testing and poking around, I don’t believe that tex.m is the relevant point to solve this problem. (For reference: I use R1013a on 64-bit Linux.) True that you can hack tex.m to make Matlab use another (La)TeX engine. But that’s only part of the deal, because the latex run doesn’t really render the font, it only produces the dvi file, which just contains positioning information.

When I run tex(‘$\sf x = 5$’,’verbose’,2), it reports no errors but a number of successes, including finding cmss10.tfm. That is the file that latex uses in order to typeset cmss10; it contains the font metrics, but not the font glyphs needed for rendering.

When I put a debugging breakpoint at the end of tex.m, and then run xlabel(‘$\sf x = 5$’, ‘Interpreter’, ‘latex’), I don’t get an error message until the breakpoint, either. At this point, the rendering to the figure window hasn’t happened yet. If I let Matlab continue from the breakpoint, the figure window is updated and the familiar message “Warning: Font cmss10 is not supported” appears.

The problem does not lie in the built-in latex not being able to process the string into dvi, it lies in Matlab not being able to render the dvi. I suspect that in order to render, Matlab would need a file like mwa_cmss10.ttf in sys/fonts/ttf/cm for screen display and a file like mwa_cmss10.pfb in sys/fonts/type1/cm for eps output.

A current installation of TeXlive does not contain cmss10 anymore. Computer Modern has been replaced by Latin Modern, available as an OpenType file in texmf/fonts/opentype/public/lm/lmsans10-regular.otf; and I can’t find a pfb version on my system.

Instead, I tried to copy cmss10.ttf from an installation of matplotlib to sys/fonts/ttf/cm/mwa_cmss10.ttf, but with no effect. I guess there is some kind of font registration in which the file has to be listed to be available. For the pfb-files there is sys/fonts/fonts.scale, fonts.dir, and encodings.dir, but I couldn’t find anything for ttf files.

I also tried to install cmss10.ttf as a system font. It does show up in Matlab’s font selection dialogue as “cmss10”, but if used the rendering is wrong, and it doesn’t keep ‘Interpreter’ = ‘latex’ from complaining.

Any more ideas, anyone? I’d really like to be able using latex sans serif again.

I despise the route that matlab has gone into regarding latex since version 2010. Thank you Dan, for the nice work-around. I’m interested to what people have cooked up regadring more elaborate tex.m contraptions.

Thanks Lubos. Matlab’s text engine doesn’t seem to support the soul package. When I get some time, I will try to switch out matlab’s tex engine and try the soul package.

Malcolm, yes, I can (and do) set the background color of the entire uicontrol. But I failed mention earlier that the text box has lots of words in it (sometimes many lines of text). My goal is to highlight only one of the words in yellow…aka showing the results from a text search.

That is a great idea. I’m kind of embarrassed that I didn’t think of this myself (I guess I got caught up with trying to tweak what Matlab already had there). I gave your sample code a try and it worked great (although it might still be a good idea to use Matlab’s mwarticle.cls file, or a variation of it, to get the text located in the proper location in the figure). I briefly gave XeLaTeX a try with hopes that I could use system fonts. As XeLaTeX produces an extended dvi file (xdv), I modified your overload function for tex.m to be

function[dviout,errout,auxout] = tex(varargin)
    fid = fopen('matlab.dvi');
    dviout = fread(fid, 'uint8');	
    dviout = uint8(dviout);	
    fclose(fid);	
    errout = [];	
    auxout = [];
end

If I use the same .tex file that you specify above, than everything works the same as with a dvi produced with LaTeX. Unfortunately, when I compile the following code with XeLaTeX:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Helvetica}

\begin{document}
\setbox0=\hbox{$x = \alpha$}\copy0\special{bounds: \the\wd0 \the\ht0 \the\dp0}
\end{document}


in an attempted to use the standard Hevletica font, and feed the xdv file into Matlab, Matlab doesn’t like it and crashes. Any thoughts?

Can you not just set the BackgroundColor of the uicontrol?

The easiest way to highlight some text is to use soul package:

\usepackage{soul}
\hl{Highlighted text.}

It is recommended to employ also package color in order to use color references.

But there is one thing: I’m not sure how MATLAB will interpret \usepackage command. Anyway, you can try it in proper (La)TeX editor and if you find it easy to use then switch to MATLAB and see what happen 😉

I’ve been using tex to set the font color of individual words successfully,
but background color doesn’t seem to be supported by Matlab’s tex engine.
Perhaps overloading matlab’s tex.m is the answer.
Though I assume I would have to get everyone else who uses my script to install the new LaTeX engine?
What would be the best LaTeX engine for changing background color?

My main restriction is that I’m dealing with figures and text objects that already exist, so I can’t simply use a different method (javacomponent) to create the text object.

Thanks,
Brian