MATLAB: Can I fill the bars of a histogram with a pattern in MATLAB 7.9 (R2009b)

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I plot two histograms in the same figure, and would like to be able to easily differentiate between the histograms. For example, I would like to add a striped pattern to the bars of one of the histograms. I cannot change the color, because I need to print the figure in black and white.

Best Answer

The following example illustrates how you can vary the shading of the bars in the histogram, or change the line style and add markers to the vertices to help differentiate between different histograms.
In the histogram, each bar is a face specified by four vertices. To create a simple pattern across the face, you can specify a different color for each vertex, and then set the 'FaceColor' property to 'interp' to interpolate between the vertex colors.
 
x = -4:0.1:4;
y = randn(10000,1);
hist(y,x) 
%Find the handle to the patch object which is used to create the bars of
%the histogram
h = findobj(gca,'Type','patch');
%Get the location of the vertices and their 'CData'
v = get(h, 'Vertices');
c = get(h, 'FaceVertexCData');
%Change the color of any vertex with y = 0
ind = v(:,2)==0;
c(ind)=50;
set(h, 'FaceVertexCData', c)
%Set the face color of the patch objects to interpolate the color of the
%vertices
set(h, 'FaceColor', 'interp')
colormap gray
%%You can also change the line style, line width, or add markers to the
% vertices
set(h, 'LineStyle', ':', 'Marker', '*')
Unfortunately, it is not possible to add a striped pattern to the histogram. This is because it is only possible to specify a single color for an entire face, or the color of each vertex of a face.
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