Matlab copy-and-paste: Still broken after all these years

Copy-and-paste is one of the fundamental innovations brought to us by the transition from text-based user interfaces to graphical user interfaces (GUIs). GUIs have been in mainstream use since the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, so it comes as something of a surprise to learn that Matlab’s copy-and-paste functionality is still deeply broken, twenty years later.

Suppose I want to take a Matlab figure, copy it to the clipboard, and then paste it into a Word document. Furthermore, suppose that I want it to look decent if I then print the Word document. To make this happen, the image that is copied to the clipboard has to have a resolution of at least 300 dots per inch (DPI). Even the first laser printers printed at 300 DPI, and current laser printers typically print at 600 DPI. Typical monitor resolutions are much lower — even a good LCD monitor today is typically only 100 DPI. So copying my figure into Word at the monitor resolution is just not going to cut it. A 100 DPI image looks terrible when printed. I need it to be at 300 DPI at least, and I might very well want it to be higher.

So, when I select “Copy figure…” from my figure’s Edit menu, I want a 300 DPI image of what’s on my screen copied to the clipboard, so then when I go and do Edit > Paste in Word, I get a beautiful 300 DPI image in my Word document. You’d think this wouldn’t be that much to ask, right? I want to take my Matlab figure, paste it into a Word document, and have it not look like crap when printed. Surely, more than twenty years since the advent of the graphical user interface, what-you-see-is- what-you-get, and desktop publishing, this is all old hat for any application worth its salt. Right? Well, not so much…

In Matlab, there is no way to get “Copy Figure” to produce a bitmap that is at any resolution other than the screen resolution (as of R2006b in Windows XP). In the preferences, you can configure several aspects of Matlab’s copy-and-paste behavior, but not the resolution of the final bitmap. You always get it at the screen resolution, which is almost never adequate. Roughly twenty years after this capability should have been part of Matlab, it’s still not present.

On the whole, I think Matlab is a beautiful piece of software. I use it every day, and most of the time I enjoy the heck out of it. It’s very simple and very powerful. But when I’m done analyzing my data, I almost always want to take a figure from Matlab and export it to some other program. This is exactly what copy-and-paste is for, but Matlab’s implementation of copy-and-paste is so broken that I always end up saving my figure to a file and then importing that file into the target application, which takes about ten times as long as copy-and-paste would. If I only did this once a month, it probably wouldn’t make me as insane as it does. But I do it maybe ten times a day, almost every day. Twenty years ago, some wise person at Apple (or maybe Xerox PARC) had exactly the same problem, and invented a solution for it: copy-and-paste. But twenty years later, The Mathworks still hasn’t gotten the memo.

This should be fixed in the next release of Matlab. It should have been fixed a long, long time ago, so fixing it now is really the least The Mathworks could do. If Cleve Moler were here, he would say the same thing.

And another thing: Why do I even have to do Edit > Copy figure to do the copy? Why not just Ctrl-C, like every other application on the planet? In Matlab figures, for some reason, Ctrl-C is used when you decide to edit a figure, and select some element of the figure you want copied to the clipboard. I myself have never used this functionality, and I don’t think I’m the only one. Has The Mathworks looked at how often that’s used compared to “Copy figure”? I would bet almost anything that “Copy figure” is the more commonly used function. If I’m right, it seems like it should be bound to Ctrl-C, not that other function. And in any case, couldn’t Ctrl-C be bound to “Copy figure” if the figure is not being edited?