@efferre79: I agree with the fact that importing SVG files directly is still not an option, because support is completely absent for old versions of MSOffice and very poor even in 2016+ versions I've had at hand. My experience though is that Octave's own emf files are generally of poor quality. My advice to students that really want to use MSWord for their reports is to use Inkscape (like Dmitri poited out) to convert svg files into much better looking EMF figures.

So considering the maintenance burden  I would also be in favor of dropping support for fig and emf formats in Octave: it was never really convincing anyway.

As a convenience function, if you have inkscape installed, I attached a simple function that you can call as below:

demo text 6
inkprint -demf toto.emf

to obtain the attached emf file.



(file #56401, file #56402)

I don't agree, old versions of Office don't support SVG!

thanks dmitri for the hints! it seems the pipeline of commands should be changed to support latest ghostscript versions.

I confirm the problem on Fedora 40 with ghostscript 10.02.1.
Doing:

octave:1> plot (1:3)
octave:2> print t1.pdf

(pdf is OK)
and than in the shell:

$ pstoedit -ssp -f fig t1.pdf t1.fig
pstoedit: version 4.00 / DLL interface 108 (release build - g++ 14.0.1 20240118 (Red Hat 14.0.1-0) - 64-bit) : Copyright (C) 1993 - 2023 Wolfgang Glunz

the resulting file (t1.fig) is pretty much empty.

$ cat t1.fig
#FIG 3.2
Portrait
Flush left
Inches
Letter
100.00
Single
0
1200 2

I have not investigate it further.

Dmitri.
--

I had installed ghostscript 10.03.1. The printing to EMF is again broken. I solved temporarily by downgrading to ghostscript 9.53.3.

This is an example script to trigger the issue:

plot(1,1)
print -debug test.emf

The output file test.emf is empty (0 length). It seems another case of bug #55906 or bug #58702.

The debugging output I get is

fig2dev command: '/usr/bin/fig2dev -L emf 2> /dev/null'
svgconvert command: '/usr/libexec/octave/9.2.0/exec/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/octave-svgconvert - %s 96.17 "/usr/share/octave/9.2.0/fonts/FreeSans.otf" 1 "%s"'
pstoedit command: '/usr/libexec/octave/9.2.0/exec/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/octave-svgconvert - %s 96.17 "/usr/share/octave/9.2.0/fonts/FreeSans.otf" 1 "%s" ; /usr/bin/pstoedit -ssp -f fig "%s" 2> /dev/null'
opengl-pipeline: '/usr/libexec/octave/9.2.0/exec/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/octave-svgconvert - pdf 96.17 "/usr/share/octave/9.2.0/fonts/FreeSans.otf" 1 "/tmp/oct-AsT0F3" ; /usr/bin/pstoedit -ssp -f fig "/tmp/oct-AsT0F3" 2> /dev/null "/tmp/oct-wxcXas.fig" ; /usr/bin/fig2dev -L emf 2> /dev/null "/tmp/oct-wxcXas.fig" "test.emf"'

How can I avoid the deletion of the temporary file /tmp/oct-AsT0F3 used by octave-svgconvert to further debug the issue on the shell?

Moreover -debug option is not documented in the plot() help!