I am trying to save a publication quality version of a very large graphics object (a [19290x1566] spectrogram plotted on loglog axes using surf). I need the text to be in editable vector format per journal requirements, but every approach I can find that theoretically should save a vector image file (and successfully does with a smaller figure) ends up crashing both Matlab and my computer.
I'm noting some details of what I've tried in terms of saving a vector file below for reference, but the only solution I've managed to come up with is to first save the figure as an eps image file and crop it to just the image portion in Adobe Illustrator, then manually delete the surface object and save the empty axes as a vector eps file... then put the two back together in Illustrator. This seems like a right silly solution but I can't find anything better.
Is there any way of saving figures as vector files that preserve axes and text but with the image portion saved as a single raster raster object?
For reference, I'm using Matlab 2023a (but have run into the same problem since at least 2015) and have tried using a range of options with the print function:
print(gcf,'test', '-depsc', '-vector')
I've also tried '-dpdf' and '-dsvg' both with and without the '-vector' option, as well as more complicated approaches like variants of the recommendations provided in both of the following articles/answers:
