How does one properly save figure with a matlab executable in Linux without the DISPLAY environement variable set?

I'm trying to deploy an executable to a Linux machine that does not have X11 installed and on which the DISPLAY environment variable is not set. This Linux installation is one blade of a very large cluster, and the code could be run on any one of those blades. I've been using

h1=figure('visible','off','PaperPositionMode','auto')
hgexport(h1,fname,hgexport('factorystyle'),'format','tiff')

in the normal Matlab GUI environment and the figure is reproduced properly. I've deployed this to a machine with the 'DISPLAY=:0' and this also saves the figure properly. However, if I unset DISPLAY on this deployed machine the figure is no longer saved properly. Doing this reproduces the behavior we see on the Linux blade. The text is mangled and the axes positions are different. The output is very similar to what I get in the normal operating environment if I use a simple

saveas(h1,'text.tif','tif')

or

print(h1,'-dpng','text.png')

without setting PaperPositinMode to 'auto'.

Is there a way to make this work on a Linux machine without setting the DISPLAY variable? Or does this way of saving a figure to a file only work on a machine with X11 installed and the DISPLAY variable set properly? Because of the large number of blades involved, it would be quite a task to install X11 on all of them.

Edit 12/2/2013: For what it's worth, I can reproduce the error by running in the

matlab -nodisplay -nosplash

mode. In this mode I get the same problem and it is insensitive to whether the DISPLAY environment variable is set.

Thanks,

Doug

[Shawn Harrison]

Did you ever find an answer to this questions?

Answer 1

[Doug]

No, never did. I forget what I ended up doing. Haven't checked if this is still a problem in the latest versions.