MATLAB FIG File Viewer

A .fig file is what MATLAB writes when someone saves a figure window with File, Save As, or with savefig in a script. It is the native format, so it keeps the actual data of every line and surface rather than a flat picture. That is why professors, supervisors, colleagues and paper authors often send .fig files: a lab result, a simulation plot from a thesis, a figure attached to a MATLAB Answers post or a GitHub repository. The catch is that only MATLAB opens it. On a phone, a Chromebook, a laptop without a licence, or when you just want to see the plot before a meeting, there is nothing to double click.

This page reads the file itself. A .fig is a MAT file underneath, the same container MATLAB uses for saved variables, holding a tree of the figure, its axes and every graphics object with its properties. FigOpen walks that tree and draws each axes at its saved position with its limits, ticks, grid, box, title and axis labels, then the lines with their colours, widths, dash styles and markers, scatter points, bars, areas, stairs, error bars, patches, surfaces and images. Legends sit where they were placed. 3D plots are drawn from the saved camera angle.

Two layouts are supported. Figures saved by MATLAB 7 up to R2024b store the classic hgS_070000 tree. Figures from R2025a onward, when MathWorks rebuilt its graphics, store the objects in a newer class format that many third party readers cannot read. FigOpen reads both, so a figure from a current MATLAB opens just like one from an old lab PC. We tested public figures saved between 2011 and 2026, including one in the new R2025a format, with line plots, legends, several subplots, 3D mesh surfaces and patch drawings.

Speed was a goal from the start. The reader is a small script of about 18 KB that downloads while the page is idle, and the file is read in a background worker so the page never freezes. A typical figure opens in well under a second. A 24 MB figure with two million points is drawn in under a second on a laptop, with its CSV ready about a second later, because long lines are thinned to the screen width while keeping every peak and trough. The CSV still holds every saved point.

Your figure never leaves your device. The file is read by code running in this tab, and the PNG, SVG and CSV are made on your computer too. There is no upload, no account and no AI model, so unpublished results stay private. Closing the tab clears everything. The plot is shown as a picture, so callbacks or app code saved inside a figure never run.

This is a viewer, not MATLAB. The plot is redrawn from the saved data, so fonts and spacing can differ slightly from the original window, and LaTeX labels are shown as plain text. App layouts made with GUIDE hold buttons and fields but no plot, and only work with their .m file in MATLAB. Figures saved with the -v7.3 option use HDF5 and are not read yet. Specialised charts such as heatmaps and word clouds are listed but not drawn. MATLAB is a trademark of The MathWorks, Inc. TaskNinja is not connected to MathWorks.