According the purpose, print nice plots for the thesis, I have some out-of-Matlab recommendations.
1) plot everything as usual, you get a figure handle and an axes handle
h = figure( ... )
a = gca
2) use the data cursor
function of the figure window and interactively insert the base points for your later splines. You can additional points by right-click.
t = linspace(0,2*pi,1000);
[x y] = deal(sin(t),cos(t))
Later you delete the "visual" part of the data tip inside Illustrator/Inkscape, if you just want to keep the anchor point of the vector graphic to snap your splines.
There is also the possibility of custom data tips: Tutorial at Matlab Central
3) I once wrote a function to nicely plot Matlab figures as vector graphic based PDFs. You can specify height, width and how much white margin around you want. You just need to pass figure and axes handle and the name:
function saveFigure( fig_handle, axes_handle, name , height , width , margin)
set(axes_handle,'LooseInset',get(gca,'TightInset'));
set(fig_handle, 'Units','centimeters','PaperUnits','centimeters')
% the last two parameters of 'Position' define the figure size
set(fig_handle,'Position',[-margin -margin width height],...
'PaperPosition',[0 0 width+margin height+margin],...
'PaperSize',[width+margin height+margin],...
'PaperPositionMode','auto',...
'InvertHardcopy', 'on',...
'Renderer','painters'... %recommended if there are no alphamaps
);
saveas(fig_handle,name,'pdf')
end
4) You get a PDF you could directly use for Latex - for use in MS Office use 'emf'
(
Enhanced metafile) rather than 'pdf'
. Open this file with Adobe Illustrator (preferable as it offers layers) or Inkskape (Open Source).
5) The datatips are recognized as graphical objects, you can catch them and draw a spline on them. For Illustrator I'd recommend to put the spline in another layer than the actual figure. Later you can just swap the figure and give the spline new anchor points. In Inkscape you could use the grouping function to keep everything together.
6) I'd say you save a lot of time over a only-Matlab-solution. Good look!