Drawing (2d) figure without DISPLAY set

I have an existent function which draws a page with plotted lines from data. We have to run this function overnight on various datasets from several users using an automated ('at') command. Running it this way provides no graphical environment, i.e. the DISPLAY variable is not set. Therefore I'm looking for a way to run headless and save the results to a file (likewise PNG or PDF). The difficult parts seems to be just this: I experimented with various commandline options -nodisplay -noFigurewindows and also with the 'Visible' parameter of the figure command - without DISPLAY set I couldn't generate any graphics ... I'm now looking for more information about those commandline parameters, what they are doing and under which circumstances they should/could be applied. Although I found pieces of information in the documentation and the community discussion nothing did really solve my problem. I grateful for any hints regarding this issue.

[2000rogers]

I stumbled about another (probably not related) problem when trying the examples from:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/96452-how-do-i-run-matlab-in-batch-mode-on-a-unix-machine

No output but an error message from alternatePrintPath:

 Error using alternatePrintPath (line 52)
Invalid printer '' specified.

and no file was written. Maybe some defaults have changed?