MATLAB: Save Axis Labels/Titles/Ticks for Iterative Plotting

handle graphicsplotting

I have two different surfaces to plot, under mildly different model assumptions. I go through a lot of trouble modifying the axis ticks, labels, title etc for the first surface. The majority of these are the same for the second surface, only the title will be different. Unfortunately when I replot the second set of data, all my work has disappeared! I need to go through all the axis labels, ticks etc. a second time. Is there a way to save all that info for iterative plotting?

Thanks.

Best Answer

If you have set the XTick or YTick property yourself, such as via set(), then the ticks will be retained when the data changes. More specifically, if you set() the XTick or YTick properties then the respective *TickMode property is set to 'manual', and when that property is 'manual' then ticks will not be recalculated.

The ticks and titles are part of the axes, so you can copyobj() the axes, set() it's Position if you need to, and set() the child surface's XData, YData, ZData (and perhaps CData) to the new data. If you took a bunch of trouble setting up the ticks on the first one, then the 'manual' property of the tick mode should be copied.

And if not... you can always set() the XTick or YTick properties of the new axes to the get() of the appropriate *Tick properties of the first axes.

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Deletting X and Y axes ticks

set(gca,'xtick',[]) set(gca,'ytick',[])

MATLAB: Problem with tick marks on second y-axis

...the following command ... doesnt work. Whats my problem?

set(AX(2),gca,'YTickLabel',[0,5,10,15,20])

Got too many handles -- you told it to work on AX(2), the RH axes already, so don't want (and can't have) the gca as well--

set(AX(2),'YTickLabel',[0:20])

Actually, you really probably want to set the tick values, not just the labels. The 'ticklabel' property writes the text on existing tick marks wherever they're located and in whatever number they already exist, either wrapping the text over if fewer text entries than ticks just ignoring extra entries if more strings than the number of ticks are passed. That is, for this purpose use

set(AX(2),'YTick',[0:20])

instead and the labels will automagically reflect the tick location values and be at the locations wanted consistent with the axis limits. The label property is really user-changeable to allow you to use other labels besides the defaults like categories or the like. One other use is to fixup the sloppy formatting in the default wherein the '0' and '1' in the default axes tick marks lack the '.0' to be consistent with the intermediary '0.1', etc. It's just a little detail that makes Matlab plots look less professional than they should... :(

Oh, one last thing...on plotyy, I generally just use

set(AX(2),'xtick',[])

to just not display the second x-axis labels at all. One still must do any scaling on both, of course, but saves just a little on the formatting, too.

ADDENDUM

I've not used the recent release of Matlab "in anger" having retired from the technical consulting gig to return to family farm in roughly 2000. At that time linkprop wasn't available in R12 but the alternate way to keep the two x-axes in synch with plotyy appears to be (after just a very brief test) to be

hAx=plotyy(...  % create the handles/basic figure
hLnk=linkprop(hAx,{'xtick','xticklabel','xlim'});  % link the x-axes

Now you can just use whatever operations on the one axes object and the two will stay in synch...

datetick(hAx(1),'x','keeplimits','keepticks')

and both change together. It's kinda' handy as datetick hasn't been vectorized to accept multiple handles for some reason I don't quite follow.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Deletting X and Y axes ticks

MATLAB: Problem with tick marks on second y-axis

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