MATLAB: Adjusting properties of polar histogram

polar histogram

Hi all, I'm using the polarhistogram function with Matlab R2017a.

I'm trying to do a couple of things and can't figure out how to adjust these properties.

1) Change the radius scale from fractions to percents.

2) Add labels for the radius / degree axis.

3) Change the background grid lines from gray to black.

Are there easy ways to do the above? Thank you.

Best Answer

The best way to see what properties a figure has is to open the property inspector.

set the RTickLabel property. Make sure you have a label for each tick. Note that the label text is indepedent of the tick location value. You can set tick locations with the RTick property.
Set the ThetaTickLabel property (one for each tick). Note that the label text is independent of the tick location value. You can set tick locations with the ThetaTick property.
Set the GridColor property. Because the line is so thin, making it black doesn't make it much darker. I do not see a property for grid line width.

% Example from the doc
theta = [0.1 1.1 5.4 3.4 2.3 4.5 3.2 3.4 5.6 2.3 2.1 3.5 0.6 6.1];
h=polarhistogram(theta,6)
set(gca,'RTickLabel',[0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4],...
    "ThetaTickLabel",[0:3:30],...
    "GridColor",'k')

Related Solutions

MATLAB: How to move position of tick labels on a polar histogram plot

This is a pretty kludgy way to do it, but it works. I hope there is something better!

theta = [0.1 1.1 5.4 3.4 2.3 4.5 3.2 3.4 5.6 2.3 2.1 3.5 0.6 6.1];

figure
polarhistogram(theta,6)
set(gca,'ThetaTick',     [0 30 60 90 120 150 180 210 240 270 300 330], ...
        'ThetaTickLabel',{'' 30 60 90 120 150 180 210 240 270 300 330})
text(0.1,4,'0-ish')

Here's what I've done:

Started with the first example in the documentation
Manually added the theta tick locations
Manually added the theta tick labels (using a cell array), but notice that I've put a empty character where the 0 would have been
Added text (slightly offset from zero) as an additional "tick label"

Here's the result. (Notice that the actual tick location was not affected, but the label is offset.)

MATLAB: Color indidual labels in plot

As Walter The Great has explained here, this isn't possible to do since the tick labels are not processed through an interpreter nor HTML.

You can replace the y ticks with text() objects instead with the 2 lines of code below (axh is the handle to the axes).

axh = cla(); 
set(axh, 'YTick', 1:3, 'YTickLabel','')
ylim(axh,[0,4])  % Axis limits must be set first!



xlim(axh,[0,4])  % Axis limits must be set first!
h = text(min(xlim(axh))*ones(3,1), 1:3, {'one','two','three'},'rotation',90, ...
'VerticalAlignment', 'bottom', 'HorizontalAlignment', 'center')
h(2).Color = 'r';

Alternatively, you can use this file exchange function (labelpoints.m) and the line of code below (axh is the handle to the axes).

axh = cla();
set(axh, 'YTick', 1:3, 'YTickLabel','')
ylim(axh,[0,4])  % Axis limits must be set first!
xlim(axh,[0,4])  % Axis limits must be set first!
labelpoints(min(xlim(axh)), 1:3, {'one','two','three'}, 'W', 0.3, ...
    'rotation',90,'Color', {'k', 'r', 'k'},'FontSize', 12);

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MATLAB: How to move position of tick labels on a polar histogram plot

MATLAB: Color indidual labels in plot

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