Handle graphics – Undocumented Matlab https://undocumentedmatlab.com Charting Matlab's unsupported hidden underbelly Sat, 17 Mar 2018 19:03:59 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.1 Auto-scale image colorshttps://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/auto-scale-image-colors https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/auto-scale-image-colors#comments Wed, 21 Feb 2018 18:06:23 +0000 https://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=7334

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I deal extensively in image processing in one of my consulting projects. The images are such that most of the interesting features are found in the central portion of the image. However, the margins of the image contain z-values that, while not interesting from an operational point-of-view, cause the displayed image’s color-limits (axes CLim property) to go wild. An image is worth a thousand words, so check the following raw image (courtesy of Flightware, Inc.), displayed by the following simple script:

hImage = imagesc(imageData); colormap(gray); colorbar;

Raw image with default Matlab CLim

### Rescaling the axes color-limits

As you can see, this image is pretty useless for human-eye analysis. The reason is that while all of the interesting features in the central portion of the image have a z-value of ~-6, the few pixels in the margins that have a z-value of 350+ screw up the color limits and ruin the perceptual resolution (image contrast). We could of course start to guess (or histogram the z-values) to get the interesting color-limit range, and then manually set hAxes.CLim to get a much more usable image:

hAxes = hImage.Parent; hAxes.CLim = [-7.5,-6];

Raw image with a custom CLim

### Auto-scaling the axes color-limits

Since the z-values range and distribution changes between different images, it would be better to automatically scale the axes color-limits based on an analysis of the image. A very simple technique for doing this is to take the 5%,95% or 10%,90% percentiles of the data, clamping all outlier data pixels to the extreme colors. If you have the Stats Toolbox you can use the prctile function for this, but if not (or even if you do), here’s a very fast alternative that automatically scales the axes color limits based on the specified threshold (a fraction between 0-0.49):

% Rescale axes CLim based on displayed image portion's CData function rescaleAxesClim(hImage, threshold) % Get the displayed image portion's CData CData = hImage.CData; hAxes = hImage.Parent; XLim = fix(hAxes.XLim); YLim = fix(hAxes.YLim); rows = min(max(min(YLim):max(YLim),1),size(CData,1)); % visible portion cols = min(max(min(XLim):max(XLim),1),size(CData,2)); % visible portion CData = CData(unique(rows),unique(cols)); CData = CData(:); % it's easier to work with a 1d array   % Find the CLims from this displayed portion's CData CData = sort(CData(~isnan(CData))); % or use the Stat Toolbox's prctile() thresholdVals = [threshold, 1-threshold]; thresholdIdxs = fix(numel(CData) .* thresholdVals); CLim = CData(thresholdIdxs);   % Update the axes hAxes.CLim = CLim; end

Note that a threshold of 0 uses the full color range, resulting in no CLim rescaling at all. At the other extreme, a threshold approaching 0.5 reduces the color-range to a single value, basically reducing the image to an unusable B/W (rather than grayscale) image. Different images might require different thresholds for optimal contrast. I believe that a good starting point for the threshold is a value of 0.10, which corresponds to the 10-90% range of CData values.

### Dynamic auto-scaling of axes color-limits

This is very nice for the initial image display, but if we zoom-in, or pan a sub-image around, or update the image in some way, we would need to repeat calling this rescaleAxesClim() function every time the displayed image portion changes, otherwise we might still get unusable images. For example, if we zoom into the image above, we will see that the color-limits that were useful for the full image are much less useful on the local sub-image scale. The first (left) image uses the static custom color limits [-7.5,-6] above (i.e., simply zooming-in on that image, without modifying CLim again); the second (right) image is the result of repeating the call to rescaleAxesClim(), which improves the image contrast:

Zoomed-in image with a custom static CLim

Zoomed-in image with a re-applied custom CLim

We could in theory attach the rescaleAxesClim() function as a callback to the zoom and pan functions (that provide such callback hooks). However, we would still need to remember to manually call this function whenever we modify the image or its containing axes programmatically.

A much simpler way is to attach our rescaleAxesClim() function as a callback to the image’s undocumented MarkedClean event:

% Instrument image: add a listener callback to rescale upon any image update addlistener(hImage, 'MarkedClean', @(h,e)rescaleAxesClim(hImage,threshold));

In order to avoid callback recursion (potentially caused by modifying the axes CLim within the callback), we need to add a bit of code to the callback that prevents recursion/reentrancy (details). Here’s one simple way to do this:

% Rescale axes CLim based on displayed image portion's CData function rescaleAxesClim(hImage, threshold) % Check for callback reentrancy inCallback = getappdata(hImage, 'inCallback'); if ~isempty(inCallback), return, end try setappdata(hImage, 'inCallback',1); % prevent reentrancy   % Get the displayed image portion's CData ... (copied from above)   % Update the axes hAx.CLim = CLim; drawnow; pause(0.001); % finish all graphic updates before proceeding catch end setappdata(hImage, 'inCallback',[]); % reenable this callback end

The result of this dynamic automatic color-scaling can be seen below:

Zoomed-in image with dynamic CLim

### autoScaleImageCLim utility

I have created a small utility called autoScaleImageCLim, which includes all the above, and automatically sets the specified input image(s) to use auto color scaling. Feel free to download this utility from the Matlab File Exchange. Here are a few usage examples:

autoScaleImageCLim() % auto-scale the current axes' image autoScaleImageCLim(hImage,5) % auto-scale image using 5%-95% CData limits autoScaleImageCLim(hImage,.07) % auto-scale image using 7%-93% CData limits

(note that the hImage input parameter can be an array of image handles)

Hopefully one day the so-useful MarkedClean event will become a documented and fully-supported event for all HG objects in Matlab, so that we won’t need to worry that it might not be supported by some future Matlab release…

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Matlab objects have numerous built-in properties (some of them publicly-accessible/documented and others not, but that’s a different story). For various purposes, it is sometimes useful to attach custom user-defined properties to such objects. While there was never a fully-documented way to do this, most users simply attached such properties as fields in the UserData property or the object’s [hidden] ApplicationData property (accessible via the documented setappdata/getappdata functions).

An undocumented way to attach actual new user-defined properties to objects such as GUI handles or Java references has historically (in HG1, up to R2014a) been to use the undocumented schema.prop function, as I explained here. As I wrote in that post, in HG2 (R2014b onward), we can use the fully-documented addprop function to add new custom properties (and methods) to such objects. What is still NOT documented, as far as I could tell, is that all of Matlab’s builtin handle graphics objects indirectly inherit the dynamicprops class, which allows this. The bottom line is that we can dynamically add custom properties in run-time to any HG object, without affecting any other object. In other words, the new properties will only be added to the handles that we specifically request, and not to any others.

All this is important, because for some unexplained reason that escapes my understanding, MathWorks chose to seal its classes, thus preventing users to extend them with sub-classes that contain the new properties. So much frustration could have been solved if MathWorks would simply remove the Sealed class meta-property from its classes. Then again, I’d have less to blog about in that case…

Anyway, why am I rehashing old news that I have already reported a few years ago?

Well, first, because my experience has been that this little tidbit is [still] fairly unknown by Matlab developers. Secondly, I happened to run into a perfect usage example a short while ago that called for this solution: a StackExchange user asked whether it is possible to tell a GUI figure’s age, in other words the elapsed time since the figure was created. The simple answer would be to use setappdata with the creation date whenever we create a figure. However, a “cleaner” approach seems to be to create new read-only properties for the figure’s CreationTime and Age:

First, create a small Matlab function as follows, that attaches the CreationTime property to a figure:

function setCreationTime(hFig,varargin) hProp = addprop(hFig,'CreationTime'); hFig.CreationTime = now; hProp.SetAccess = 'private'; % make property read-only after setting its initial value   hProp = addprop(hFig,'Age'); hProp.GetMethod = @(h,e) etime(datevec(hFig.CreationTime), clock); % compute on-the-fly hProp.SetAccess = 'private'; % make property read-only end

Now assign this function as the default CreateFcn callback function for all new figures from now on:

set(0,'DefaultFigureCreateFcn',@setCreationTime)

That’s it – you’re done! Whenever a new figure will be created from now on, it will have two custom read-only properties: CreationTime and Age.

For example:

>> newFig = figure; >> newFig.CreationTime ans = 737096.613706748   >> ageInDays = now - newFig.CreationTime ageInDays = 0.0162507836846635 >> ageDuration = duration(ageInDays*24,0,0) ageDuration = duration 00:23:24 >> ageString = datestr(ageInDays, 'HH:MM:SS.FFF') ageString = '00:23:24.068'   >> ageInSecs = newFig.Age ageInSecs = 1404.06771035492

Note that an alternative way to set the computed property Age would have been to set its value to be an anonymous function, but this would have necessitated invoking it with parenthesis (as in: ageInSecs = newFig.Age()). By setting the property’s GetMethod meta-property we avoid this need.

Keen readers will have noticed that the mechanism that I outlined above for the Age property/method can also be used to add custom user methods. For example, we can create a new custom property named refresh that would be read-only and have a GetMethod which is the function handle of the function that refreshes the object in some way.

Do you have any special uses for custom user-defined properties/methods in your program? or perhaps you have a use-case that might show MathWorks why sub-classing the built-in classes might improve your work? if so, then please place a comment about it below. If enough users show MathWorks why this is important, then maybe it will be fixed in some future release.

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Customizing axes tick labelshttps://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-axes-tick-labels https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-axes-tick-labels#comments Wed, 24 Jan 2018 13:38:26 +0000 https://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=7304

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In last week’s post, I discussed various ways to customize bar/histogram plots, including customization of the tick labels. While some of the customizations that I discussed indeed rely on undocumented properties/features, many Matlab users are not aware that tick labels can be individually customized, and that this is a fully documented/supported functionality. This relies on the fact that the default axes TickLabelInterpreter property value is 'tex', which supports a wide range of font customizations, individually for each label. This includes any combination of symbols, superscript, subscript, bold, italic, slanted, face-name, font-size and color – even intermixed within a single label. Since tex is the default interpreter, we don’t need any special preparation – simply set the relevant X/Y/ZTickLabel string to include the relevant tex markup.

To illustrate this, have a look at the following excellent answer by user Ubi on Stack Overflow:

Axes with Tex-customized tick labels

plot(1:10, rand(1,10)) ax = gca;   % Simply color an XTickLabel ax.XTickLabel{3} = ['\color{red}' ax.XTickLabel{3}];   % Use TeX symbols ax.XTickLabel{4} = '\color{blue} \uparrow';   % Use multiple colors in one XTickLabel ax.XTickLabel{5} = '\color[rgb]{0,1,0}green\color{orange}?';   % Color YTickLabels with colormap nColors = numel(ax.YTickLabel); cm = jet(nColors); for i = 1:nColors ax.YTickLabel{i} = sprintf('\\color[rgb]{%f,%f,%f}%s', cm(i,:), ax.YTickLabel{i}); end

In addition to 'tex', we can also set the axes object’s TickLabelInterpreter to 'latex' for a Latex interpreter, or 'none' if we want to use no string interpretation at all.

As I showed in last week’s post, we can control the gap between the tick labels and the axle line, using the Ruler object’s undocumented TickLabelGapOffset, TickLabelGapMultiplier properties.

Also, as I explained in other posts (here and here), we can also control the display of the secondary axle label (typically exponent or units) using the Ruler’s similarly-undocumented SecondaryLabel property. Note that the related Ruler’s Exponent property is documented/supported, but simply sets a basic exponent label (e.g., '\times10^{6}' when Exponent==6) – to set a custom label string (e.g., '\it\color{gray}Millions'), or to modify its other properties (position, alignment etc.), we should use SecondaryLabel.

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Customizing histogram plotshttps://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-histogram-plots https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-histogram-plots#respond Wed, 17 Jan 2018 20:41:15 +0000 https://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=7292

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Earlier today, I was given the task of displaying a histogram plot of a list of values. In today’s post, I will walk through a few customizations that can be done to bar plots and histograms in order to achieve the desired results.

We start by binning the raw data into pre-selected bins. This can easily be done using the builtin histc (deprecated) or histcounts functions. We can then use the bar function to plot the results:

[binCounts, binEdges] = histcounts(data); hBars = bar(hAxes, binEdges(1:end-1), binCounts);

Basic histogram bar plot

Let’s improve the appearance: In my specific case, the data was financial return (percentage) values, so let’s modify the x-label format accordingly and display a title. To make the labels and title more legible, we decrease the axes FontSize to 8 and remove the axes box:

hAxes = hBar.Parent; xtickformat(hAxes, '%g%%'); title(hAxes, 'Distribution of total returns (monthly %)'); set(hAxes, 'FontSize',8, 'Box','off')

Improved histogram bar plot

So far nothing undocumented. Note that the xtickformat/ytickformat functions were only introduced in R2016b – for earlier Matlab releases see this post (which does rely on undocumented aspects).

Now, let’s use a couple of undocumented properties: to remove the excess white-space margin around the axes we’ll set the axes’ LooseInset property, and to remove the annoying white space between the tick labels and the X-axis we’ll set the XRuler‘s TickLabelGapOffset property to -2 (default: +2):

set(hAxes, 'LooseInset',[0,0,0,0]); % default = [.13,.11,.095,.075] hAxes.XRuler.TickLabelGapOffset = -2; % default = +2

Even better histogram bar plot

Note that I used the undocumented axes XRuler property instead of the axes’ documented XAxis property, because XAxis is only available since R2015b, whereas XRuler (which points to the exact same object as XAxis) exists ever since R2014b, and so is better from a backward-compatibility standpoint. In either case, the ruler’s TickLabelGapOffset property is undocumented. Note that the ruler also contains another associated and undocumented TickLabelGapMultiplier property (default: 0.2), which I have not modified in this case.

Now let’s take a look at the bin labels: The problem with the bar plot above is that it’s not intuitively clear whether the bin for “5%”, for example, includes data between 4.5-5.5 or between 5.0-6.0 (which is the correct answer). It would be nicer if the labels were matched to the actual bin edges. There are 3 basic ways to fix this:

1. We could modify the bar plot axes tick values and labels, in essence “cheating” by moving the tick labels half a bin leftward of their tick values (don’t forget to add the extra tick label on the right):
hAxes.XTick(end+1) = hAxes.XTick(end) + 1; % extra tick label on the right labels = hAxes.XTickLabels; % preserve tick labels for later use below hAxes.XTick = hAxes.XTick - 0.5; % move tick labels 1/2 bin leftward hAxes.XTickLabel = labels; % restore pre-saved tick labels hAxes.XLim = hAxes.XLim - 0.5; % ...and align the XLim

Improved labels

2. We could use the bar function’s optional 'histc' flag, in order to display the bars in histogram mode. The problem in histogram mode is that while the labels are now placed correctly, the bars touch each other – I personally find distinct bars that are separated by a small gap easier to understand.
hBars = bar(..., 'histc'); % [snip] - same customizations to hAxes as done above

Basic histogram plot

With the original bar chart we could use the built-in BarWidth to set the bar/gap width (default: 0.8 meaning a 10% gap on either side of the bar). Unfortunately, calling bar with 'hist' or 'histc' (i.e. histogram mode) results in a Patch (not Bar) object, and patches do not have a BarWidth property. However, we can modify the resulting patch vertices in order to achieve the same effect:

% Modify the patch vertices (5 vertices per bar, row-based) hBars.Vertices(:,1) = hBars.Vertices(:,1) + 0.1; hBars.Vertices(4:5:end,1) = hBars.Vertices(4:5:end,1) - 0.2; hBars.Vertices(5:5:end,1) = hBars.Vertices(5:5:end,1) - 0.2;   % Align the bars & labels at the center of the axes hAxes.XLim = hAxes.XLim + 0.5;

This now looks the same as option #1 above, except that the top-level handle is a Patch (not Bar) object. For various additional customizations, either Patch or Bar might be preferable, so you have a choice.

Improved histogram plot

3. Lastly, we could have used the builtin histogram function instead of bar. This function also displays a plot with touching bars, as above, using Quadrilateral objects (a close relative of Patch). The solution here is very similar to option #2 above, but we need to dig a bit harder to modify the patch faces, since their vertices is not exposed as a public property of the Histogram object. To modify the vertices, we first get the private Face property (explanation), and then modify its vertices, keeping in mind that in this specific case the bars have 4 vertices per bar and a different vertices matrix orientation:
hBars = histogram(data, 'FaceAlpha',1.0, 'EdgeColor','none'); % [snip] - same customizations to hAxes as done above   % Get access to *ALL* the object's properties oldWarn = warning('off','MATLAB:structOnObject'); warning off MATLAB:hg:EraseModeIgnored hBarsStruct = struct(hBars); warning(oldWarn);   % Modify the patch vertices (4 vertices per bar, column-based) drawnow; % this is important, won't work without this! hFace = hBarsStruct.Face; % a Quadrilateral object (matlab.graphics.primitive.world.Quadrilateral) hFace.VertexData(1,:) = hFace.VertexData(1,:) + 0.1; hFace.VertexData(1,3:4:end) = hFace.VertexData(1,3:4:end) - 0.2; hFace.VertexData(1,4:4:end) = hFace.VertexData(1,4:4:end) - 0.2;

In conclusion, there are many different ways to improve the appearance of charts in Matlab. Even if at first glance it may seem that some visualization function does not have the requested customization property or feature, a little digging will often find either a relevant undocumented property, or an internal object whose properties could be modified. If you need assistance with customizing your charts for improved functionality and appearance, then consider contacting me for a consulting session.

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Last week, a Matlab user asked whether it is possible to customize the context (right-click) menu that is presented in plot-edit mode. This menu is displayed by clicking the plot-edit (arrow) icon on the standard Matlab figure toolbar, then right-clicking any graphic/GUI element in the figure. Unfortunately, it seems that this context menu is only created the first time that a user right-clicks in plot-edit mode – it is not accessible before then, and so it seems impossible to customize the menu before it is presented to the user the first time.

A few workarounds were suggested to the original poster and you are most welcome to review them. There is also some discussion about the technical reasons that none of the “standard” ways of finding and modifying menu items fail in this case.

In today’s post I wish to repost my solution, in the hope that it might help other users in similar cases.

My solution is basically this:

1. First, enter plot-edit mode programmatically using the plotedit function
2. Next, move the mouse to the screen location of the relevant figure component (e.g. axes). This can be done in several different ways (the root object’s PointerLocation property, the moveptr function, or java.awt.Robot.mouseMove() method).
3. Next, automate a mouse right-click using the built in java.awt.Robot class (as discussed in this blog back in 2010)
4. Next, locate the relevant context-menu item and modify its label, callback or any of its other properties
5. Next, dismiss the context-menu by simulating a follow-on right-click using the same Robot object
6. Finally, exit plot-edit mode and return the mouse pointer to its original location
% Create an initial figure / axes for demostration purpose fig = figure('MenuBar','none','Toolbar','figure'); plot(1:5); drawnow;   % Enter plot-edit mode temporarily plotedit(fig,'on'); drawnow   % Preserve the current mouse pointer location oldPos = get(0,'PointerLocation');   % Move the mouse pointer to within the axes boundary % ref: https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/undocumented-mouse-pointer-functions figPos = getpixelposition(fig); % figure position axPos = getpixelposition(gca,1); % axes position figure(fig); % ensure that the figure is in focus newPos = figPos(1:2) + axPos(1:2) + axPos(3:4)/4; % new pointer position set(0,'PointerLocation',newPos); % alternatives: moveptr(), java.awt.Robot.mouseMove()   % Simulate a right-click using Java robot % ref: https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/gui-automation-robot robot = java.awt.Robot; robot.mousePress (java.awt.event.InputEvent.BUTTON3_MASK); pause(0.1) robot.mouseRelease(java.awt.event.InputEvent.BUTTON3_MASK); pause(0.1)   % Modify the <clear-axes> menu item hMenuItem = findall(fig,'Label','Clear Axes'); if ~isempty(hMenuItem) label = '<html><b><i><font color="blue">Undocumented Matlab'; callback = 'web(''https://undocumentedmatlab.com'',''-browser'');'; set(hMenuItem, 'Label',label, 'Callback',callback); end   % Hide the context menu by simulating a left-click slightly offset set(0,'PointerLocation',newPos+[-2,2]); % 2 pixels up-and-left pause(0.1) robot.mousePress (java.awt.event.InputEvent.BUTTON1_MASK); pause(0.1) robot.mouseRelease(java.awt.event.InputEvent.BUTTON1_MASK); pause(0.1)   % Exit plot-edit mode plotedit(fig,'off'); drawnow   % Restore the mouse pointer to its previous location set(0,'PointerLocation',oldPos);

In this code, I sprinkled a few pauses at several locations, to ensure that everything has time to fully render. Different pause values, or perhaps no pause at all, may be needed on your specific system.

Modifying the default context-menu shown in plot-edit mode may perhaps be an uncommon use-case. But the technique that I demonstrated above – of using a combination of Matlab and Java Robot commands to automate a certain animation – can well be used in many other use-cases where we cannot easily access the underlying code. For example, when the internal code is encoded/encrypted, or when a certain functionality (such as the plot-edit context-menu) is created on-the-fly.

If you have encountered a similar use-case where such automated animations can be used effectively, please add a comment below.

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Customizing contour plots part 2https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-contour-plots-part2 https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-contour-plots-part2#comments Sun, 12 Nov 2017 11:03:37 +0000 https://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=7149

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A few weeks ago a user posted a question on Matlab’s Answers forum, asking whether it is possible to display contour labels in the same color as their corresponding contour lines. In today’s post I’ll provide some insight that may assist users with similar customizations in other plot types.

Matlab does not provide, for reasons that escape my limited understanding, documented access to the contour plot’s component primitives, namely its contour lines, labels and patch faces. Luckily however, these handles are accessible (in HG2, i.e. R2014b onward) via undocumented hidden properties aptly named EdgePrims, TextPrims and FacePrims, as I explained in a previous post about contour plots customization, two years ago.

[X,Y,Z] = peaks; [C,hContour] = contour(X,Y,Z, 'ShowText','on', 'LevelStep',1);

The result is the screenshot on the left:

Standard Matlab contour labels

Customized Matlab contour labels

In order to update the label colors (to get the screenshot on the right), we create a short updateContours function that updates the TextPrims color to their corresponding EdgePrims color:

### The updateContours() function

function updateContours(hContour) % Update the text label colors drawnow % very important! levels = hContour.LevelList; labels = hContour.TextPrims; % undocumented/unsupported lines = hContour.EdgePrims; % undocumented/unsupported for idx = 1 : numel(labels) labelValue = str2double(labels(idx).String); lineIdx = find(abs(levels-labelValue)<10*eps, 1); % avoid FP errors using eps labels(idx).ColorData = lines(lineIdx).ColorData; % update the label color %labels(idx).Font.Size = 8; % update the label font size end drawnow % optional end

Note that in this function we don’t directly equate the numeric label values to the contour levels’ values: this would work well for integer values but would fail with floating-point ones. Instead I used a very small 10*eps tolerance in the numeric comparison.

Also note that I was careful to call drawnow at the top of the update function, in order to ensure that EdgePrims and TextPrims are updated when the function is called (this might not be the case before the call to drawnow). The final drawnow at the end of the function is optional: it is meant to reduce the flicker caused by the changing label colors, but it can be removed to improve the rendering performance in case of rapidly-changing contour plots.

Finally, note that I added a commented line that shows we can modify other label properties (in this case, the font size from 10 to 8). Feel free to experiment with other label properties.

### Putting it all together

The final stage is to call our new updateContours function directly, immediately after creating the contour plot. We also want to call updateContours asynchronously whenever the contour is redrawn, for example, upon a zoom/pan event, or when one of the relevant contour properties (e.g., LevelStep or *Data) changes. To do this, we add a callback listener to the contour object’s [undocumented] MarkedClean event that reruns our updateContours function:

[X,Y,Z] = peaks; [C,hContour] = contour(X,Y,Z, 'ShowText','on', 'LevelStep',1);   % Update the contours immediately, and also whenever the contour is redrawn updateContours(hContour); addlistener(hContour, 'MarkedClean', @(h,e)updateContours(hContour));

### Contour level values

As noted in my comment reply below, the contour lines (hContour.EdgePrims) correspond to the contour levels (hContour.LevelList).

For example, to make all negative contour lines dotted, you can do the following:

[C,hContour] = contour(peaks, 'ShowText','on', 'LevelStep',1); drawnow set(hContour.EdgePrims(hContour.LevelList<0), 'LineStyle', 'dotted');

Customized Matlab contour lines

As I noted on my previous post on contour plot customization, I am marking this article as “High risk of breaking in future Matlab versions“, not because of the basic functionality (being important enough I don’t presume it will go away anytime soon) but because of the property names: TextPrims, EdgePrims and FacePrims don’t seem to be very user-friendly property names. So far MathWorks has been very diligent in making its object properties have meaningful names, and so I assume that when the time comes to expose these properties, they will be renamed (perhaps to TextHandles, EdgeHandles and FaceHandles, or perhaps LabelHandles, LineHandles and FillHandles). For this reason, even if you find out in some future Matlab release that TextPrims, EdgePrims and FacePrims don’t exist, perhaps they still exist and simply have different names. Note that these properties have not changed their names or functionality in the past 3 years, so while it could well happen next year, it could also remain unchanged for many years to come. The exact same thing can be said for the MarkedClean event.

### Professional assistance anyone?

As shown by this and many other posts on this site, a polished interface and functionality is often composed of small professional touches, many of which are not exposed in the official Matlab documentation for various reasons. So if you need top-quality professional appearance/functionality in your Matlab program, or maybe just a Matlab program that is dependable, robust and highly-performant, consider employing my consulting services.

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Tips for accelerating Matlab performancehttps://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/tips-for-accelerating-matlab-performance https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/tips-for-accelerating-matlab-performance#comments Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:25:06 +0000 http://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=7099

Related posts:
1. Performance: scatter vs. line In many circumstances, the line function can generate visually-identical plots as the scatter function, much faster...
2. Plot LimInclude properties The plot objects' XLimInclude, YLimInclude, ZLimInclude, ALimInclude and CLimInclude properties are an important feature, that has both functional and performance implications....
3. Plot performance Undocumented inner plot mechanisms can significantly improve plotting performance ...
4. Performance: accessing handle properties Handle object property access (get/set) performance can be significantly improved using dot-notation. ...

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I’m proud to report that MathWorks has recently posted my article “Tips for Accelerating MATLAB Performance” in their latest newsletter digest (September 2017). This article is an updated and expanded version of my post about consulting work that I did for the Crustal Dynamics Research Group at Harvard University, where I helped speed-up a complex Matlab-based GUI by a factor of 50-500 (depending on the specific feature).

Crustal dynamics visualization GUI

Featuring an article on the official newsletter by a non-MathWorker is rare. Doing this with someone like myself who has a reputation for undocumented aspects, and a consultancy business that potentially competes with theirs, is certainly not obvious. I take this to be a sign that despite the possible drawbacks of publishing my article, MathWorks felt that it provided enough value to the Matlab user community to merit the risk. I applaud MathWorks for this, and thank them for the opportunity of being featured in their official newsletter and conferences. I do not take it for granted in the least.

The newsletter article provides multiple ideas of improving the run-time performance for file I/O and graphics. Many additional techniques for improving Matlab’s performance can be found under the Performance tag in this blog, as well as in my book “Accelerating MATLAB Performance” (CRC Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1482211290).

Next week I will present live online webinars about various ways to improve Matlab’s run-time performance:

These live webinars will be 3.5 hours long, starting at 10am EDT (7am PDT, 3pm UK, 4pm CET, 7:30pm IST, time in your local timezone), with a short break in the middle. The presentations content will be based on onsite training courses that I presented at multiple client locations (details). A recording of the webinars will be available for anyone who cannot join the live events.

Email me if you would like additional information on the webinars or my consulting, or to inquire regarding an onsite training course.

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Customizing axes part 5 – origin crossover and labelshttps://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-axes-part-5-origin-crossover-and-labels https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-axes-part-5-origin-crossover-and-labels#comments Wed, 27 Jul 2016 17:00:02 +0000 http://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=6564

Related posts:
1. Customizing axes rulers HG2 axes can be customized in numerous useful ways. This article explains how to customize the rulers. ...
2. Customizing axes part 2 Matlab HG2 axes can be customized in many different ways. This article explains some of the undocumented aspects. ...
3. Undocumented scatter plot jitter Matlab's scatter plot can automatically jitter data to enable better visualization of distribution density. ...
4. HG2 update HG2 appears to be nearing release. It is now a stable mature system. ...

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When HG2 graphics was finally released in R2014b, I posted a series of articles about various undocumented ways by which we can customize Matlab’s new graphic axes: rulers (axles), baseline, box-frame, grid, back-drop, and other aspects. Today I extend this series by showing how we can customize the axes rulers’ crossover location.

Non-default axes crossover location

### The documented/supported stuff

Until R2015b, we could only specify the axes’ YAxisLocation as 'left' (default) or 'right', and XAxisLocation as 'bottom' (default) or 'top'. For example:

x = -2*pi : .01 : 2*pi; plot(x, sin(x)); hAxis = gca; hAxis.YAxisLocation = 'left'; % 'left' (default) or 'right' hAxis.XAxisLocation = 'bottom'; % 'bottom' (default) or 'top'

Default axis locations: axes crossover is non-fixed

The crossover location is non-fixed in the sense that if we zoom or pan the plot, the axes crossover will remain at the bottom-left corner, which changes its coordinates depending on the X and Y axes limits.

Since R2016a, we can also specify 'origin' for either of these properties, such that the X and/or Y axes pass through the chart origin (0,0) location. For example, move the YAxisLocation to the origin:

hAxis.YAxisLocation = 'origin';

Y-axis location at origin: axes crossover at 0 (fixed), -1 (non-fixed)

And similarly also for XAxisLocation:

hAxis.XAxisLocation = 'origin';

X and Y-axis location at origin: axes crossover fixed at (0,0)

The axes crossover location is now fixed at the origin (0,0), so as we move or pan the plot, the crossover location changes its position in the chart area, without changing its coordinates. This functionality has existed in other graphic packages (outside Matlab) for a long time and until now required quite a bit of coding to emulate in Matlab, so I’m glad that we now have it in Matlab by simply updating a single property value. MathWorks did a very nice job here of dynamically updating the axles, ticks and labels as we pan (drag) the plot towards the edges – try it out!

### The undocumented juicy stuff

So far for the documented stuff. The undocumented aspect is that we are not limited to using the (0,0) origin point as the fixed axes crossover location. We can use any x,y crossover location, using the FirstCrossoverValue property of the axes’ hidden XRuler and YRuler properties. In fact, we could do this since R2014b, when the new HG2 graphics engine was released, not just starting in R2016a!

% Set a fixed crossover location of (pi/2,-0.4) hAxis.YRuler.FirstCrossoverValue = pi/2; hAxis.XRuler.FirstCrossoverValue = -0.4;

Custom fixed axes crossover location at (π/2,-0.4)

For some reason (bug?), setting XAxisLocation/YAxisLocation to ‘origin’ has no visible effect in 3D plots, nor is there any corresponding ZAxisLocation property. Luckily, we can set the axes crossover location(s) in 3D plots using FirstCrossoverValue just as easily as for 2D plots. The rulers also have a SecondCrossoverValue property (default = -inf) that controls the Z-axis crossover, as Yaroslav pointed out in a comment below. For example:

N = 49; x = linspace(-10,10,N); M = peaks(N); mesh(x,x,M);

Default crossover locations at (-10,±10,-10)

hAxis.XRuler.FirstCrossoverValue = 0; % X crossover with Y axis hAxis.YRuler.FirstCrossoverValue = 0; % Y crossover with X axis hAxis.ZRuler.FirstCrossoverValue = 0; % Z crossover with X axis hAxis.ZRuler.SecondCrossoverValue = 0; % Z crossover with Y axis

Custom fixed axes crossover location at (0,0,-10)

hAxis.XRuler.SecondCrossoverValue = 0; % X crossover with Z axis hAxis.YRuler.SecondCrossoverValue = 0; % Y crossover with Z axis

Custom fixed axes crossover location at (0,0,0)

### Labels

Users will encounter the following unexpected behavior (bug?) when using either the documented *AxisLocation or the undocumented FirstCrossoverValue properties: when setting an x-label (using the xlabel function, or the internal axes properties), the label moves from the center of the axes (as happens when XAxisLocation=’top’ or ‘bottom’) to the right side of the axes, where the secondary label (e.g., exponent) usually appears, whereas the secondary label is moved to the left side of the axis:

Unexpected label positions

In such cases, we would expect the labels locations to be reversed, with the main label on the left and the secondary label in its customary location on the right. The exact same situation occurs with the Y labels, where the main label unexpectedly appears at the top and the secondary at the bottom. Hopefully MathWorks will fix this in the next release (it is probably too late to make it into R2016b, but hopefully R2017a). Until then, we can simply switch the strings of the main and secondary label to make them appear at the expected locations:

% Switch the Y-axes labels: ylabel(hAxis, '\times10^{3}'); % display secondary ylabel (x10^3) at top set(hAxis.YRuler.SecondaryLabel, 'Visible','on', 'String','main y-label'); % main label at bottom   % Switch the X-axes labels: xlabel(hAxis, '2^{nd} label'); % display secondary xlabel at right set(hAxis.XRuler.SecondaryLabel, 'Visible','on', 'String','xlabel'); % main label at left

As can be seen from the screenshot, there’s an additional nuisance: the main label appears a bit larger than the axes font size (the secondary label uses the correct font size). This is because by default Matlab uses a 110% font-size for the main axes label, ostensibly to make them stand out. We can modify this default factor using the rulers’ hidden LabelFontSizeMultiplier property (default=1.1). For example:

hAxis.YRuler.LabelFontSizeMultiplier = 1; % use 100% font-size (same as tick labels) hAxis.XRuler.LabelFontSizeMultiplier = 0.8; % use 80% (smaller than standard) font-size

Note: I described the ruler objects in my first article of the axes series. Feel free to read it for more ideas on customizing the axes rulers.

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Customizing uifigures part 1https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-uifigures-part-1 https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-uifigures-part-1#comments Thu, 21 Jul 2016 10:32:51 +0000 http://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=6554

Related posts:
1. HG2 update HG2 appears to be nearing release. It is now a stable mature system. ...
2. Customizing print setup Matlab figures print-setup can be customized to automatically prepare the figure for printing in a specific configuration...
3. Plot LineSmoothing property LineSmoothing is a hidden and undocumented plot line property that creates anti-aliased (smooth unpixelized) lines in Matlab plots...
4. getundoc – get undocumented object properties getundoc is a very simple utility that displays the hidden (undocumented) properties of a specified handle object....

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Last month, I posted an article that summarized a variety of undocumented customizations to Matlab figure windows. As I noted in that post, Matlab figures have used Java JFrames as their underlying technology since R14 (over a decade ago), but this is expected to change a few years from now with the advent of web-based uifigures. uifigures first became available in late 2014 with the new App Designer preview (the much-awaited GUIDE replacement), and were officially released in R2016a. AppDesigner is actively being developed and we should expect to see exciting new features in upcoming Matlab releases.

Matlab's new AppDesigner (a somewhat outdated screenshot)

However, while AppDesigner has become officially supported, the underlying technology used for the new uifigures remained undocumented. This is not surprising: MathWorks did a good job of retaining backward compatibility with the existing figure handle, and so a new uifigure returns a handle that programmatically appears similar to figure handles, reducing the migration cost when MathWorks decides (presumably around 2018-2020) that web-based (rather than Java-based) figures should become the default figure type. By keeping the underlying figure technology undocumented and retaining the documented top-level behavior (properties and methods of the figure handle), Matlab users who only use the documented interface should expect a relatively smooth transition at that time.

So does this mean that users who start using AppDesigner today (and especially in a few years when web figures become the default) can no longer enjoy the benefits of figure-based customization offered to the existing Java-based figure users (which I listed in last month’s post)? Absolutely not! All we need is to get a hook into the uifigure‘s underlying object and then we can start having fun.

### The uifigure Controller

One way to do this is to use the uifigure handle’s hidden (private) Controller property (a matlab.ui.internal.controller.FigureController MCOS object whose source-code appears in %matlabroot%/toolbox/matlab/uitools/uicomponents/components/+matlab/+ui/+internal/+controller/).

Controller is not only a hidden but also a private property of the figure handle, so we cannot simply use the get function to get its value. This doesn’t stop us of course: We can get the controller object using either my getundoc utility or the builtin struct function (which returns private/protected properties as an undocumented feature):

>> hFig = uifigure('Name','Yair', ...);   >> figProps = struct(hFig); % or getundoc(hFig) Warning: Calling STRUCT on an object prevents the object from hiding its implementation details and should thus be avoided. Use DISP or DISPLAY to see the visible public details of an object. See 'help struct' for more information. (Type "warning off MATLAB:structOnObject" to suppress this warning.)   Warning: figure JavaFrame property will be obsoleted in a future release. For more information see the JavaFrame resource on the MathWorks web site. (Type "warning off MATLAB:HandleGraphics:ObsoletedProperty:JavaFrame" to suppress this warning.)   figProps = JavaFrame: [] JavaFrame_I: [] Position: [87 40 584 465] PositionMode: 'auto' ... Controller: [1x1 matlab.ui.internal.controller.FigureController] ControllerMode: 'auto' ...   >> figProps.Controller ans = FigureController with properties:   Canvas: [] ProxyView: [1x1 struct]   >> figProps.Controller.ProxyView ans = PeerNode: [1x1 com.mathworks.peermodel.impl.PeerNodeImpl] PeerModelManager: [1x1 com.mathworks.peermodel.impl.PeerModelManagerImpl]   >> struct(figProps.Controller) Warning: Calling STRUCT on an object prevents the object from hiding its implementation details and should thus be avoided. Use DISP or DISPLAY to see the visible public details of an object. See 'help struct' for more information. (Type "warning off MATLAB:structOnObject" to suppress this warning.)   ans = PositionListener: [1x1 event.listener] ContainerPositionCorrection: [1 1 0 0] Container: [1x1 matlab.ui.internal.controller.FigureContainer] Canvas: [] IsClientReady: 1 PeerEventListener: [1x1 handle.listener] ProxyView: [1x1 struct] Model: [1x1 Figure] ParentController: [0x0 handle] PropertyManagementService: [1x1 matlab.ui.internal.componentframework.services.core.propertymanagement.PropertyManagementService] IdentificationService: [1x1 matlab.ui.internal.componentframework.services.core.identification.WebIdentificationService] EventHandlingService: [1x1 matlab.ui.internal.componentframework.services.core.eventhandling.WebEventHandlingService]

I will discuss all the goodies here in a future post (if you are curious then feel free to start drilling in there yourself, I promise it won’t bite you…). However, today I wish to concentrate on more immediate benefits from a different venue:

### The uifigure webwindow

uifigures are basically webpages rather than desktop windows (JFrames). They use an entirely different UI mechanism, based on HTML webpages served from a localhost webserver that runs CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework version 3.2272 on Chromium 41 in R2016a). This runs the so-called CEF client (apparently an adaptation of the CefClient sample application that comes with CEF; the relevant Matlab source-code is in %matlabroot%/toolbox/matlab/cefclient/). It uses the DOJO Javascript toolkit for UI controls visualization and interaction, rather than Java Swing as in the existing JFrame figures. I still don’t know if there is a way to combine the seemingly disparate sets of GUIs (namely adding Java-based controls to web-based figures or vice-versa).

Anyway, the important thing to note for my purposes today is that when a new uifigure is created, the above-mentioned Controller object is created, which in turn creates a new matlab.internal.webwindow. The webwindow class (%matlabroot%/toolbox/matlab/cefclient/+matlab/+internal/webwindow.m) is well-documented and easy to follow (although the non camel-cased class name escaped someone’s attention), and allows access to several important figure-level customizations.

The figure’s webwindow reference can be accessed via the Controller‘s Container‘s CEF property:

>> hFig = uifigure('Name','Yair', ...); >> warning off MATLAB:structOnObject % suppress warning (yes, we know it's naughty...) >> figProps = struct(hFig);   >> controller = figProps.Controller; % Controller is a private hidden property of Figure >> controllerProps = struct(controller);   >> container = controllerProps.Container % Container is a private hidden property of FigureController container = FigureContainer with properties:   FigurePeerNode: [1x1 com.mathworks.peermodel.impl.PeerNodeImpl] Resizable: 1 Position: [86 39 584 465] Tag: '' Title: 'Yair' Icon: 'C:\Program Files\Matlab\R2016a\toolbox\matlab\uitools\uicomponents\resources\images…' Visible: 1 URL: 'http://localhost:31417/toolbox/matlab/uitools/uifigureappjs/componentContainer.html…' HTML: 'toolbox/matlab/uitools/uifigureappjs/componentContainer.html' ConnectorPort: 31417 DebugPort: 0 IsWindowValid: 1   >> win = container.CEF % CEF is a regular (public) hidden property of FigureContainer win = webwindow with properties:   URL: 'http://localhost:31417/toolbox/matlab/uitools/uifigureappjs/component…' Title: 'Yair' Icon: 'C:\Program Files\Matlab\R2016a\toolbox\matlab\uitools\uicomponents\re…' Position: [86 39 584 465] CustomWindowClosingCallback: @(o,e)this.Model.hgclose() CustomWindowResizingCallback: @(event,data)resizeRequest(this,event,data) WindowResizing: [] WindowResized: [] FocusGained: [] FocusLost: [] DownloadCallback: [] PageLoadFinishedCallback: [] MATLABClosingCallback: [] MATLABWindowExitedCallback: [] PopUpWindowCallback: [] RemoteDebuggingPort: 0 CEFVersion: '3.2272.2072' ChromiumVersion: '41.0.2272.76' isWindowValid: 1 isDownloadingFile: 0 isModal: 0 isWindowActive: 1 isAlwaysOnTop: 0 isAllActive: 1 isResizable: 1 MaxSize: [] MinSize: []   >> win.URL ans = http://localhost:31417/toolbox/matlab/uitools/uifigureappjs/componentContainer.html?channel=/uicontainer/393ed66a-5e34-41f3-8ac0-0b0f3b0738cd&snc=5C2353

An alternative way to get the webwindow is via the list of all webwindows stored by a central webwindowmanager:

webWindows = matlab.internal.webwindowmanager.instance.findAllWebwindows(); % manager method returning an array of all open webwindows webWindows = matlab.internal.webwindowmanager.instance.windowList; % equivalent alternative via manager's windowList property

Note that the controller, container and webwindow class objects, like most Matlab MCOS objects, have internal (hidden) properties/methods that you can explore. For example:

>> getundoc(win) ans = Channel: [1x1 asyncio.Channel] CustomEventListener: [1x1 event.listener] InitialPosition: [100 100 600 400] JavaScriptReturnStatus: [] JavaScriptReturnValue: [] NewWindowBeingCreated: 0 NewWindowCreated: 1 UpdatedPosition: [86 39 584 465] WindowHandle: 2559756 newURL: 'http://localhost:31417/toolbox/matlab/uitools/uifigureappjs/componentContai…'

### Using webwindow for figure-level customizations

We can use the methods of this webwindow object as follows:

win.setAlwaysOnTop(true); % always on top of other figure windows (a.k.a. AOT)   win.hide(); win.show(); win.bringToFront();   win.minimize(); win.maximize(); win.restore();   win.setMaxSize([400,600]); % enables resizing up to this size but not larger (default=[]) win.setMinSize([200,300]); % enables resizing down to this size but not smaller (default=[]) win.setResizable(false);   win.setWindowAsModal(true);   win.setActivateCurrentWindow(false); % disable interaction with this entire window win.setActivateAllWindows(false); % disable interaction with *ALL* uifigure (but not Java-based) windows   result = win.executeJS(jsStr, timeout); % run JavaScript

In addition to these methods, we can set callback functions to various callbacks exposed by the webwindow as regular properties (too bad that some of their names [like the class name itself] don’t follow Matlab’s standard naming convention, in this case by appending “Fcn” or “Callback”):

win.FocusGained = @someCallbackFunc; win.FocusLost = @anotherCallbackFunc;

In summary, while the possible customizations to Java-based figure windows are more extensive, the webwindow methods appear to cover most of the important ones. Since these functionalities (maximize/minimize, AOT, disable etc.) are now common to both the Java and web-based figures, I really hope that MathWorks will create fully-documented figure properties/methods for them. Now that there is no longer any question whether these features will be supported by the future technology, and since there is no question as to their usefulness, there is really no reason not to officially support them in both figure types. If you feel the same as I do, please let MathWorks know about this – if enough people request this, MathWorks will be more likely to add these features to one of the upcoming Matlab releases.

Warning: the internal implementation is subject to change across releases, so be careful to make your code cross-release compatible whenever you rely on one of Matlab’s internal objects.

Note that I labeled this post as “part 1” – I expect to post additional articles on uifigure customizations in upcoming years.

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Faster findjobjhttps://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/faster-findjobj https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/faster-findjobj#comments Mon, 11 Apr 2016 09:18:14 +0000 http://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=6376

Related posts:
1. FindJObj – find a Matlab component’s underlying Java object The FindJObj utility can be used to access and display the internal components of Matlab controls and containers. This article explains its uses and inner mechanism....
2. FindJObj GUI – display container hierarchy The FindJObj utility can be used to present a GUI that displays a Matlab container's internal Java components, properties and callbacks....
3. Matlab and the Event Dispatch Thread (EDT) The Java Swing Event Dispatch Thread (EDT) is very important for Matlab GUI timings. This article explains the potential pitfalls and their avoidance using undocumented Matlab functionality....
4. Minimize/maximize figure window Matlab figure windows can easily be maximized, minimized and restored using a bit of undocumented magic powder...

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My findjobj utility, created in 2007 and updated over the years, has received wide recognition and is employed by numerous Matlab programs, including a few dozen utilities in the Matlab File Exchange. I am quite proud of this utility and find it extremely useful for customizing Matlab controls in many ways that are impossible using standard Matlab properties. I have shown many examples of this in this blog over the past years.

I am happy to announce that I have just uploaded a new version of findjobj to the Matlab File Exchange, which significantly improves the utility’s performance for the most common use-case of a single input and a single output, namely finding the handle of the underlying Java component (peer) of a certain Matlab control:

>> hButton = uicontrol('String','click me!');   >> tic, jButton = findjobj(hButton); toc % old findjobj Elapsed time is 1.513217 seconds.   >> tic, jButton = findjobj(hButton); toc % new findjobj Elapsed time is 0.029348 seconds.

The new findjobj is backward-compatible with the old findjobj and with all prior Matlab releases. It is a drop-in replacement that will significantly improve your program’s speed.

The new version relies on several techniques:

First, as I showed last year, in HG2 (R2014 onward), Matlab uipanels have finally become full-featured Java JPanels, that can be accessed and customized in many interesting manners. More to the point here, we can now directly access the underlying JPanel component handle using the uipanel‘s hidden JavaFrame property (thanks to MathWorks for supplying this useful hook!). The new findjobj version detects this and immediately returns this handle if the user specified a uipanel input.

I still do not know of any direct way to retrieve the underlying Java component’s handle for Matlab uicontrols, this has been a major frustration of mine for quite a few years. So, we need to find the containing Java container in which we will recursively search for the control’s underlying Java handle. In the old version of finjobj, we retrieve the containing figure’s JFrame reference and from it the ContentPane handle, and use this handle as the Java container that is recursively searched. This is quite slow when the figure window is heavily-laden with multiple controls. In the new version, we try to use the specified Matlab uicontrol‘s direct parent, which is very often a uipanel. In this case, we can directly retrieve the panel’s JPanel reference as explained above. This results in a must smaller and faster search since we need to recursively search far fewer controls within the container, compared to the figure’s ContentPane.

In addition, I used a suggestion by blog reader Hannes for a faster recursive search that uses the control’s tooltip rather than its size, position and class. Finally, the search order is reversed to search backward from the last child component, since this is the component that will most often contain the requested control peer.

Feel free to download and use the new findjobj version. The code for the fast variant can be found in lines #190-205 and #3375-3415.

Enjoy!

p.s. – as I explained last week, today’s discussion, and in general anything that has to do with Java peers of GUI controls, only relates to the existing JFrame-based figure windows, not to the new web-based uifigure.

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Graphic sizing in Matlab R2015bhttps://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/graphic-sizing-in-matlab-r2015b https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/graphic-sizing-in-matlab-r2015b#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2016 18:00:31 +0000 http://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=6244

Related posts:
1. HG2 update HG2 appears to be nearing release. It is now a stable mature system. ...
2. Modifying default toolbar/menubar actions The default Matlab figure toolbar and menu actions can easily be modified using simple pure-Matlab code. This article explains how....
3. FIG files format FIG files are actually MAT files in disguise. This article explains how this can be useful in Matlab applications....
4. A couple of internal Matlab bugs and workarounds A couple of undocumented Matlab bugs have simple workarounds. ...

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I would like to introduce Daniel Dolan of Sandia National Laboratories. Dan works on a variety of data analysis projects in Matlab, and is an active lurker on MATLAB Central. Dan has a habit of finding interesting bugs for the Mac version of Matlab. Today he will discuss graphic sizing in Matlab and important changes that occurred in release R2015b.

Matlab-generated graphics are often not displayed at their requested size. This problem has been known for some time and has a well-known solution: setting the root object’s ScreenPixelsPerInch property to the display’s actual DPI (dots per inch) value. Release R2015b no longer supports this solution, creating problems for publication graphics and general readability.

Physical sizing in R2015a vs. R2015b (click for full-size)

### Physical sizing

Matlab supports graphic sizing in various physical units: inches, centimeters, and points. For example:

figure; axes('Box','on', 'Units','inches','Position',[0.3 0.3 4 4]);

requests to display an axes having square sizes measuring exactly 4″ (101.6 mm) each. It is evident, however, that the displayed axes is smaller than 4″. The mismatch between requested and physical size depends on the display and operating system — go ahead, try it on your system. The problem is particularly severe on Mac laptops, presumably even worse for those with Retina displays.

The problem is that Matlab cannot determine pixel size, which varies from one display to the other. Generating a figure spanning a particular number of pixels (e.g., 1024 x 768) is easy, but absolute physical units requires a conversion factor called ScreenPixelsPerInch, which is a root property (see related post on setting/getting default graphics property values):

DPI = 110; % dots per inch for my 27" Apple Cinema Display set(0, 'ScreenPixelsPerInch',DPI); % all releases prior to R2015b set(groot,'ScreenPixelsPerInch',DPI); % R2014b through R2015a

DPI values tend to be higher for laptops, usually in the 120-130 range. Retina displays are supposed to be >300 DPI, but I have not been able to test that myself.

There are several ways to determine the correct DPI setting for a particular display. It may be available in the hardware specifications, and it can be calculated from the diagonal size and the number of pixels. Unfortunately these methods are not always reliable. If you really care about physical sizing, the best approach is to actually calibrate your display. There are tools for doing this at Matlab Central, but it’s not hard to do manually:

• Create a figure.
• Manually resize the figure to match a convenient width. I often use a piece of US letter paper as 8.5″ guide on the display.
• Determine the width of the figure in pixels:
set(gcf,'Units','pixels'); pos = get(gcf,'Position'); width = 8.5; % inches DPI = pos(3) / width;

I usually apply the DPI settings in my startup file so that Matlab begins with a calibrated display.

### What changed in 2015b?

ScreenPixelsPerInch is a read-only property in R2015b, so display calibration no longer works. The following sequence of commands:

figure('Units','inches', 'PaperPositionMode','auto', 'Position',[0 0 4 4]); set(gcf, 'MenuBar','none', 'ToolBar','none', 'DockControls','off', 'NumberTitle','off'); axes('FontUnits','points', 'FontSize',10); image

now renders differently in R2015b than does for a calibrated display in R2015a. Differences between the two outputs are shown in the screenshot at the top of this post. The grid behind the figures was rendered at 8.5″ x 8.5″ inches on my display; if your browser’s zoom level isn’t 100%, it may appear larger or smaller.

A side effect of improper graphic sizing is that text is difficult to read — the uncalibrated axes labels are clearly smaller than 10 points. These examples were rendered on ~110 DPI display. Matlab assumes that Macs use 72 DPI (96 DPI on Windows), so graphics appear at 65% of the request size.

The loss of ScreenPixelsPerInch as an adjustable setting strongly affects anyone using Matlab for publication graphics. Scientific and engineering journals are extremly strict about figure widths. With a calibrated screen, figure appear exactly as they will when printed to a file (usually EPS or PDF). Figures are often made as small as possible to and densely packed to save journal space, and accurate sized display helps the author determine legibility. Displaying accurately sized graphics is very difficult in R2015b, which is unfortunate given the many enhancements in this release.

Developers who create graphical interfaces for other users should also care about this change. A common complaint I get is that text and control labels is too small to easily read. Screen calibration deals with this problem, but this option is no longer available.

### Where do we go from here?

I reported the above issues to the Mathworks several months ago. It does not appear as a formal bug, but technical support is aware of the problem. The change is part of the “DPI aware” nature of release R2015b. So far I have found no evidence this release is any more aware of pixel size than previous releases, but my experience is limited to non-Retina Macs. I welcome input from users on other operating systems, particularly those with high-resolution displays.

To be fair, correct physical sizing is not an easy across the many platforms that Matlab runs on. Display resolution is particularly tricky when it changes during a Matlab session, such as when computer is connector to projector/television or a laptop is connected to a docking station.

Thankfully, printed graphic sizes are rendered correctly when a figure’s PaperPositionMode property is 'auto'. Many users can (and will) ignore the display problem if they aren’t dealing with strict size requirements and text legibility isn’t too bad. Some users may be willing to periodically print publication figures to externally verify sizing, but this breaks the interactive nature of Matlab figures.

A potential work around is the creating of a new figure class that oversizes figures (as needed) to account for a particular display. I started working on such a class, but the problem is more complicated than one might think:

• Child objects (axes, uicontrols, etc.) also must be resized if they are based on physical units.
• Resized objects must be temporarily restored to their original size for printing, and new objects must be tracked whenever they are added.
• Figure resolution may need to be changed when moving to different computer systems.

These capabilities are quite possible to implement, but this is a complicated solution to problem that was once easy to fix.

Retina displays don’t suffer as badly as one might think from the DPI mismatch. Even though the display specification may be greater than 200 DPI, OS X and/or Matlab must perform some intermediate size transformations. The effective DPI in R2015a is 110-120 for 13-15″ MacBook Pro laptops (at the default resolution). Objected sized with physical units still appear smaller than they should (~72/110), but not as small as I expected (<72/200).

Effect pixel size can also be changed by switching between different monitor scalings. This isn’t entirely surprising, but it can lead to some interesting results because Matlab only reads these settings at startup. Changing the display scaling during a session can cause square figures to appear rectangular. Also, the effective DPI changes for setting: I could reach values of ~60-110 DPI on an Apple Cinema Display.

So where does this leave us? Display calibration was always a finicky matter, but at least in principle one could make graphics appear exactly the same size on two different displays. Now it seems that sizing is completely variable between operation systems, displays, and display settings. For publication graphics, there will almost always be a disconnect between figure size on the screen and the printed output; some iteration may be needed to ensure everything looks right in the finished output. For graphical interfaces, font sizes may need to generated in normalized units and then converted to pixels (to avoid resizing).

Physical accuracy may not be important for non-publication figures, but the issue of text legibility remains. Some text objects–such as axes and tick labels–can easily be resized because the parent axes automatically adjusts itself as needed. Free floating text objects and uincontrols are much more difficult to deal with. Controls are often sized around the extent of their text label, so changing font sizes may require changes to the control position; adjacent controls may overlap after resizing for text clarity. Normalized units partially solve this problem, but their effect on uicontrols is not always desirable: do you really want push buttons to get larger/smaller when the figure is resized?

Can you think of a better workaround to this problem? If so, then please post a comment below. I will be very happy to hear your ideas, as I’m sure others who have high resolution displays would as well.

(cross-reference: CSSM newsgroup post)

Addendum Dec 31, 2016: Dan Dolan just posted a partial workaround on the MathWorks File Exchange. Also see the related recent article on working with non-standard DPI values.

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Customizing contour plotshttps://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-contour-plots https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-contour-plots#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2015 18:00:55 +0000 http://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=6075

Related posts:
1. Draggable plot data-tips Matlab's standard plot data-tips can be customized to enable dragging, without being limitted to be adjacent to their data-point. ...
2. Customizing contour plots part 2 Matlab contour labels' color and font can easily be customized. ...
3. Matlab’s HG2 mechanism HG2 is presumably the next generation of Matlab graphics. This article tries to explore its features....
4. getundoc – get undocumented object properties getundoc is a very simple utility that displays the hidden (undocumented) properties of a specified handle object....

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One of my clients asked me last week whether it is possible to access and customize individual contour lines and labels in HG2 (Matlab’s new graphics system, R2014+). Today’s post will discuss how this could indeed be done.

Matlab contour plot

In HG1 (R2014a and earlier), contour handles were simple hggroup objects that incorporated text and patch child handles. The contour labels, lines and fill patches could easily be accessed via these child handles (contour lines and fills use the same patch object: the lines are simply the patch edges; fills are their faces). The lines could then be customized, the label strings changed, and the patch faces (fills) recolored:

[X,Y,Z] = peaks; [C,hContour] = contour(X,Y,Z,20, 'ShowText','on'); hChildren = get(hContour, 'Children'); set(hChildren(1), 'String','Yair', 'Color','b'); % 1st text (contour label) set(hChildren(end), 'EdgeColor',[0,1,1]); % last patch (contour line)

The problem is that in HG2 (R2014b onward), contour (and its sibling functions, contourf etc.) return a graphic object that has no accessible children. In other words, hContour.Children returns an empty array:

>> hContour.Children ans = 0x0 empty GraphicsPlaceholder array. >> allchild(hContour) ans = 0x0 empty GraphicsPlaceholder array. >> isempty(hContour.Children) ans = 1

So how then can we access the internal contour patches and labels?

### HG2’s contour object’s hidden properties

Skipping several fruitless dead-ends, it turns out that in HG2 the text labels, lines and fills are stored in undocumented hidden properties called TextPrims, EdgePrims and (surprise, surprise) FacePrims, which hold corresponding arrays of matlab.graphics.primitive.world.Text, matlab.graphics.primitive.world.LineStrip and matlab.graphics.primitive.world.TriangleStrip object handles (the drawnow part is also apparently very important, otherwise you might get errors due to the Prim objects not being ready by the time the code is reached):

>> drawnow; % very important! >> hContour.TextPrims % row array of Text objects ans = 1x41 Text array:   Columns 1 through 14 Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Columns 15 through 28 Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Columns 29 through 41 Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text   >> hContour.EdgePrims % column array of LineStrip objects ans = 20x1 LineStrip array:   ineStrip LineStrip LineStrip ...   >> hContour.FacePrims % column array of TriangleStrip objects (empty if no fill) ans = 0x0 empty TriangleStrip array.

We can now access and customize the individual contour lines, labels and fills:

hContour.TextPrims(4).String = 'Dani'; hContour.TextPrims(7).Visible = 'off'; hContour.TextPrims(9).VertexData = single([-1.3; 0.5; 0]); % Label location in data units   hContour.EdgePrims(2).ColorData = uint8([0;255;255;255]); % opaque cyan hContour.EdgePrims(5).Visible = 'off';

Note that the LineStrip objects here are the same as those used for the axes Axles, which I described a few months ago. Any customization that we could do to the axle LineStrips can also be applied to contour LineStrips, and vice versa.

For example, to achieve the appearance of a topographic map, we might want to modify some contour lines to use dotted LineStyle and other lines to appear bold by having larger LineWidth. Similarly, we may wish to hide some labels (by setting their Visible property to ‘off’) and make other labels bold (by setting their Font.Weight property to ‘bold’). There are really numerous customization possibilities here.

Here is a listing of the standard (non-hidden) properties exposed by these objects:

>> get(hContour.TextPrims(1)) BackgroundColor: [] ColorData: [] EdgeColor: [] Font: [1x1 matlab.graphics.general.Font] FontSmoothing: 'on' HandleVisibility: 'on' HitTest: 'off' HorizontalAlignment: 'center' Interpreter: 'none' Layer: 'middle' LineStyle: 'solid' LineWidth: 1 Margin: 1 Parent: [1x1 Contour] PickableParts: 'visible' Rotation: 7.24591082075548 String: '-5.1541' StringBinding: 'copy' VertexData: [3x1 single] VerticalAlignment: 'middle' Visible: 'on'   >> get(hContour.EdgePrims(1)) AlignVertexCenters: 'off' AmbientStrength: 0.3 ColorBinding: 'object' ColorData: [4x1 uint8] ColorType: 'truecolor' DiffuseStrength: 0.6 HandleVisibility: 'on' HitTest: 'off' Layer: 'middle' LineCap: 'none' LineJoin: 'round' LineStyle: 'solid' LineWidth: 0.5 NormalBinding: 'none' NormalData: [] Parent: [1x1 Contour] PickableParts: 'visible' SpecularColorReflectance: 1 SpecularExponent: 10 SpecularStrength: 0.9 StripData: [1 18] Texture: [0x0 GraphicsPlaceholder] VertexData: [3x17 single] VertexIndices: [] Visible: 'on' WideLineRenderingHint: 'software'   >> get(hContour.FacePrims(1)) AmbientStrength: 0.3 BackFaceCulling: 'none' ColorBinding: 'object' ColorData: [4x1 uint8] ColorType: 'truecolor' DiffuseStrength: 0.6 HandleVisibility: 'on' HitTest: 'off' Layer: 'middle' NormalBinding: 'none' NormalData: [] Parent: [1x1 Contour] PickableParts: 'visible' SpecularColorReflectance: 1 SpecularExponent: 10 SpecularStrength: 0.9 StripData: [1 4 13 16 33 37 41 44 51 54 61 64 71 74 87 91 94 103] Texture: [0x0 GraphicsPlaceholder] TwoSidedLighting: 'off' VertexData: [3x102 single] VertexIndices: [] Visible: 'on'

But how did I know these properties existed? The easiest way in this case would be to use my getundoc utility, but we could also use my uiinspect utility or even the plain-ol’ struct function.

p.s. – there’s an alternative way, using the Java bean adapter that is associated with each Matlab graphics object: java(hContour). Specifically, this object apparent has the public method browseableChildren(java(hContour)) which returns the list of all children (in our case, 41 text labels [bean adapters], 20 lines, and a single object holding a ListOfPointsHighlight that corresponds to the regular hidden SelectionHandle property). However, I generally dislike working with the bean adapters, especially when there’s a much “cleaner” way to get these objects, in this case using the regular EdgePrims, FacePrims, TextPrims and SelectionHandle properties. Readers who are interested in Matlab internals can explore the bean adapters using a combination of my getundoc and uiinspect utilities.

So far for the easy part. Now for some more challenging questions:

### Customizing the color

First, can we modify the contour fill to have a semi- (or fully-) transparent fill color? – indeed we can:

[~, hContour] = contourf(peaks(20), 10); drawnow; % this is important, to ensure that FacePrims is ready in the next line! hFills = hContour.FacePrims; % array of TriangleStrip objects [hFills.ColorType] = deal('truecoloralpha'); % default = 'truecolor' for idx = 1 : numel(hFills) hFills(idx).ColorData(4) = 150; % default=255 end

Contour plot in HG2, with and without transparency

Similar transparency effects can also be applied to the LineStrip and Text objects. A discussion of the various combinations of acceptable color properties can be found here.

### Mouse clicks

Next, how can we set a custom context-menu for individual labels and contour lines?

Unfortunately, Text, LineStrip and TriangleStrip objects do not posses a ButtonDownFcn or UIContextMenu property, not even hidden. I tried searching in the internal/undocumented properties, but nothing came up.

##### Mouse click solution #1

So the next logical step would be to trap the mouse-click event at the contour object level. We cannot simply click the contour and check the clicked object because that would just give us the hContour object handle rather than the individual Text or LineStrip. So the idea would be to set hContour.HitTest='off', in the hope that the mouse click would be registered on the graphic object directly beneath the mouse cursor, namely the label or contour line. It turns out that the labels’ and lines’ HitTest property is ‘off’ by default, so, we also need to set them all to ‘on’:

hContour.HitTest = 'off'; [hContour.TextPrims.HitTest] = deal('on'); [hContour.EdgePrims.HitTest] = deal('on'); [hContour.FacePrims.HitTest] = deal('on'); hContour.ButtonDownFcn = @(h,e)disp(struct(e));

This seemed simple enough, but failed spectacularly: it turns out that because hContour.HitTest='off', mouse clicks are not registered on this objects, and on the other hand we cannot set the ButtonDownFcn on the primitive objects because they don’t have a ButtonDownFcn property!

Who said life is easy?

One workaround is to set the figure’s WindowButtonDownFcn property:

set(gcf, 'WindowButtonDownFcn', @myMouseClickCallback);

Now, inside your myMouseClickCallback function you can check the clicked object. We could use the undocumented builtin hittest(hFig) function to see which object was clicked. Alternatively, we could use the callback eventData‘s undocumented HitObject/HitPrimitive properties (this variant does not require the HitTest property modifications above):

function myMouseClickCallback(hFig, eventData) hitPrimitive = hittest(hFig); % undocumented function   hitObject = eventData.HitObject; % undocumented property => returns a Contour object (=hContour) hitPrimitive = eventData.HitPrimitive; % undocumented property => returns a Text or LineStrip object hitPoint = eventData.Point; % undocumented property => returns [x,y] pixels from figure's bottom-left corner   if strcmpi(hFig.SelectionType,'alt') % right-click if isa(hitPrimitive, 'matlab.graphics.primitive.world.Text') % label displayTextContextMenu(hitPrimitive, hitPoint) elseif isa(hitPrimitive, 'matlab.graphics.primitive.world.LineStrip') % contour line displayLineContextMenu(hitPrimitive, hitPoint) elseif isa(hitPrimitive, 'matlab.graphics.primitive.world.TriangleStrip') % contour fill displayFillContextMenu(hitPrimitive, hitPoint) else ... end end end
##### Mouse click solution #2

A totally different solution is to keep the default hContour.HitTest='on' (and the primitives’ as ‘off’) and simply query the contour object’s ButtonDownFcn callback’s eventData‘s undocumented Primitive property:

hContour.ButtonDownFcn = @myMouseClickCallback;

And in the callback function:

function myMouseClickCallback(hContour, eventData) hitPrimitive = eventData.Primitive; % undocumented property => returns a Text or LineStrip object hitPoint = eventData.IntersectionPoint; % [x,y,z] in data units   hFig = ancestor(hContour, 'figure'); if strcmpi(hFig.SelectionType,'alt') % right-click if isa(hitPrimitive, 'matlab.graphics.primitive.world.Text') % label displayTextContextMenu(hitPrimitive, hitPoint) elseif isa(hitPrimitive, 'matlab.graphics.primitive.world.LineStrip') % contour line displayLineContextMenu(hitPrimitive, hitPoint) elseif isa(hitPrimitive, 'matlab.graphics.primitive.world.TriangleStrip') % contour fill displayFillContextMenu(hitPrimitive, hitPoint) else ... end end end

This article should be a good start in how to code the displayTextContextMenu etc. functions to display a context menu.

### Customizations reset

Finally, there are apparently numerous things that cause our customized labels and lines to reset to their default appearance: resizing, updating contour properties etc. To update the labels in all these cases in one place, simply listen to the undocumented MarkedClean event:

addlistener(hContour, 'MarkedClean', @updateLabels);

Where updateLabels is a function were you set all the new labels.

I am marking this article as “High risk of breaking in future Matlab versions“, not because of the basic functionality (being important enough I don’t presume it will go away anytime soon) but because of the property names: TextPrims, EdgePrims and FacePrims don’t seem to be very user-friendly property names. So far MathWorks has been very diligent in making its object properties have meaningful names, and so I assume that when the time comes to expose these properties, they will be renamed (perhaps to TextHandles, EdgeHandles and FaceHandles, or perhaps LabelHandles, LineHandles and FillHandles). For this reason, even if you find out in some future Matlab release that TextPrims, EdgePrims and FacePrims don’t exist, perhaps they still exist and simply have different names.

Addendum November 11, 2017: The TextPrims, EdgePrims and FacePrims properties have still not changed their names and functionality. I explained a nice use for them in a followup post, explaining how we can modify the contour labels to have different font sizes and the same colors as their corresponding contour lines.

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2. Performance: accessing handle properties Handle object property access (get/set) performance can be significantly improved using dot-notation. ...
3. uiundo – Matlab’s undocumented undo/redo manager The built-in uiundo function provides easy yet undocumented access to Matlab's powerful undo/redo functionality. This article explains its usage....
4. Matlab’s HG2 mechanism HG2 is presumably the next generation of Matlab graphics. This article tries to explore its features....

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A client recently asked me to extend one of Matlab’s built-in graphic containers (uiflowcontainer in this specific case) with automatic scrollbars that would enable the container to act as a scroll-panel. The basic idea would be to dynamically monitor the container’s contents and when it is determined that they overflow the container’s boundaries, then attach horizontal/vertical scrollbars to enable scrolling the contents into view:

Scrollable Matlab container

This may sound simple, but there are actually quite a few undocumented hacks that make this possible, including listening to ObjectChildAdded/ObjectChildRemoved events, location/size/visibility events, layout changes etc. Maybe I’ll blog about it in some future article.

Today’s post is focused on a specific aspect of this project, attaching dynamic properties to the builtin uiflowcontainer, that would enable users to modify the container’s properties directly, as well as control aspects of the scrolling using the new properties: handles to the parent container, as well as the horizontal and vertical scrollbars, and even a new refresh() method.

The “textbook” approach to this would naturally be to create a new class that extends (inherits) uiflowcontainer and includes these new properties and methods. Unfortunately, for some reason that escapes my understanding, MathWorks saw fit to make all of its end-use graphic object classes Sealed, such that they cannot be extended by users. I did ask for this to be changed long ago, but the powers that be apparently decided that it’s better this way.

So the fallback would be to create our own dedicated class having all the new properties as well as those of the original container, and ensure that all the property values are synchronized in both directions. This is probably achievable, if you have a spare few days and a masochistic state of mind. Being the lazy bum and authority-rebel that I am, I decided to take an alternate approach that would simply add my new properties to the built-in container handle. The secret lies in the undocumented function schema.prop (for HG1, R2014a and older) and the fully-documented addprop function (for HG2, R2014b and newer).

In the examples below I use a panel, but this mechanism works equally well on any Matlab HG object: axes, lines, uicontrols, figures, etc.

The addprop function is actually a public method of the dynamicprops class. Both the dynamicprops class as well as its addprop function are fully documented. What is NOT documented, as far as I could tell, is that all of Matlab’s builtin handle graphics objects indirectly inherit dynamicprops, via matlab.graphics.Graphics, which is a high-level superclass for all HG objects. The bottom line is that we can dynamically add run-time properties to any HG object, without affecting any other object. In other words, the new properties will only be added to the handles that we specifically request, and not to any others. This suits me just fine:

hProp = addprop(hPanel, 'hHorizontalScrollBar'); hPanel.hHorizontalScrollBar = hMyScrollbar; hProp.SetAccess = 'private'; % make this property read-only

The new property hHorizontalScrollBar is now added to the hPanel handle, and can be accessed just like any other read-only property. For example:

>> get(hPanel, 'hHorizontalScrollBar') ans = JavaWrapper >> hPanel.hHorizontalScrollBar ans = JavaWrapper >> hPanel.hHorizontalScrollBar = 123 You cannot set the read-only property 'hHorizontalScrollBar' of UIFlowContainer.

Adding new methods is more tricky, since we do not have a corresponding addmethod function. The trick I used was to create a new property having the requested new method’s name, and set its read-only value to a handle of the requested function. For example:

hProp = addprop(hPanel, 'refresh'); hPanel.refresh = @myRefreshFunc; hProp.SetAccess = 'private'; % make this property read-only

We can then invoke the new refresh “method” using the familiar dot-notation:

hPanel.refresh();

Note: if you ever need to modify the initial value in your code, you should revert the property’s SetAccess meta-property to 'public' before Matlab will enable you to modify the value:

try % This will raise an exception if the property already exists hProp = addprop(hPanel, propName); catch % Property already exists - find it and set its access to public hProp = findprop(hPanel, propName); hProp.SetAccess = 'public'; end hPanel.(propName) = newValue;

### HG1 – schema.prop function

In HG1 (R2014a and earlier), we can use the undocumented schema.prop function to add a new property to any HG handle (which is a numeric value in HG1). Donn Shull wrote about schema.prop back in 2011, as part of his series of articles on UDD (Unified Data Dictionary, MCOS’s precursor). In fact, schema.prop is so useful that it has its own blog tag here and appears in no less than 15 separate articles (excluding today). With HG2’s debut 2 years ago, MathWorks tried very hard to rid the Matlab code corpus of all the legacy schema-based, replacing most major functionalities with MCOS-based HG2 code. But so far it has proven impossible to get rid of schema completely, and so schema code is still used extensively in Matlab to this day (R2015b). Search your Matlab path for “schema.prop” and see for yourself.

Anyway, the basic syntax is this:

hProp = schema.prop(hPanel, propName, 'mxArray');

The 'mxArray' specifies that the new property can accept any data type. We can limit the property to only accept certain types of data by specifying a less-generic data type, among those recognized by UDD (details).

Note that the meta-properties of the returned hProp are somewhat different from those of HG2’s hProp. Taking this into account, here is a unified function that adds/updates a new property (with optional initial value) to any HG1/HG2 object:

function addProp(hObject, propName, initialValue, isReadOnly) try hProp = addprop(hObject, propName); % HG2 catch try hProp = schema.prop(hObject, propName, 'mxArray'); % HG1 catch hProp = findprop(hObject, propName); end end if nargin > 2 try hProp.SetAccess = 'public'; % HG2 catch hProp.AccessFlags.PublicSet = 'on'; % HG1 end hObject.(propName) = initialValue; end if nargin > 3 && isReadOnly try % Set the property as read-only hProp.SetAccess = 'private'; % HG2 catch hProp.AccessFlags.PublicSet = 'off'; % HG1 end end end
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Callback functions performancehttps://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/callback-functions-performance https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/callback-functions-performance#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2015 23:36:25 +0000 http://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=5996

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3. HG2 update HG2 appears to be nearing release. It is now a stable mature system. ...
4. uicontextmenu performance Matlab uicontextmenus are not automatically deleted with their associated objects, leading to leaks and slow-downs. ...

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Matlab enables a variety of ways to define callbacks for asynchronous events (such as interactive GUI actions or timer invocations). We can provide a function handle, a cell-array (of function handle and extra parameters), and in some cases also a string that will be eval‘ed in run-time. For example:

hButton = uicontrol(..., 'Callback', @myCallbackFunc); % function handle hButton = uicontrol(..., 'Callback', {@myCallbackFunc,data1,data2}); % cell-array hButton = uicontrol(..., 'Callback', 'disp clicked!'); % string to eval

The first format, function handle, is by far the most common in Matlab code. This format has two variant: we can specify the direct handle to the function (as in @myCallbackFunc), or we could use an anonymous function, like this:

hButton = uicontrol(..., 'Callback', @(h,e) myCallbackFunc(h,e)); % anonymous function handle

All Matlab callbacks accept two input args by default: the control’s handle (hButton in this example), and a struct or object that contain the event’s data in internal fields. In our anonymous function variant, we therefore defined a function that accepts two input args (h,e) and calls myCallbackFunc(h,e).

These two variants are functionally equivalent:

hButton = uicontrol(..., 'Callback', @myCallbackFunc); % direct function handle hButton = uicontrol(..., 'Callback', @(h,e) myCallbackFunc(h,e)); % anonymous function handle

In my experience, the anonymous function variant is widely used – I see it extensively in many of my consulting clients’ code. Unfortunately, there could be a huge performance penalty when using this variant compared to a direct function handle, which many people are simply not aware of. I believe that even many MathWorkers are not aware of this, based on a recent conversation I’ve had with someone in the know, as well as from the numerous usage examples in internal Matlab code: see the screenshot below for some examples; there are numerous others scattered throughout the Matlab code corpus.

Part of the reason for this penalty not being well known may be that Matlab’s Profiler does not directly attribute the overheads. Here is a typical screenshot:

Profiling anonymous callback function performance

In this example, a heavily-laden GUI figure window was closed, triggering multiple cleanup callbacks, most of them belonging to internal Matlab code. Closing the figure took a whopping 8 secs. As can be seen from the screenshot, the callbacks themselves only take ~0.66 secs, and an additional 7.4 secs (92% of the total) is unattributed to any specific line. Think about it for a moment: we can only really see what’s happening in 8% of the time – the Profiler provides no clue about the root cause of the remaining 92%.

The solution in this case was to notice that the callback was defined using an anonymous function, @(h,e)obj.tableDeletedCallbackFcn(e). Changing all such instances to @obj.tableDeletedCallbackFcn (the function interface naturally needed to change to accept h as the first input arg) drastically cut the processing time, since direct function handles do not carry the same performance overheads as anonymous functions. In this specific example, closing the figure window now became almost instantaneous (<1 sec).

### Conclusions

There are several morals that I think can be gained from this:

1. When we see unattributed time in the Profiler summary report, odds are high that this is due to function-call overheads. MathWorks have significantly reduced such overheads in the new R2015b (released last week), but anonymous [and to some degree also class methods] functions still carry a non-negligible invocation overheads that should be avoided if possible, by using direct [possibly non-MCOS] functions.
2. Use direct function handles rather than anonymous function handles, wherever possible
3. In the future, MathWorks will hopefully improve Matlab’s new engine (“LXE”) to automatically identify cases of @(h,e)func(h,e) and replace them with faster calls to @func, but in any case it would be wise to manually make this change in our code today. It would immediately improve readability, maintainability and performance, while still being entirely future-compatible.
4. In the future, MathWorks may also possibly improve the overheads of anonymous function invocations. This is more tricky than the straight-forward lexical substitution above, because anonymous functions need to carry the run-time workspace with them. This is a little known and certainly very little-used fact, which means that in practice most usage patterns of anonymous functions can be statically analyzed and converted into much faster direct function handles that carry no run-time workspace info. This is indeed tricky, but it could directly improve performance of many Matlab programs that naively use anonymous functions.
5. Matlab’s Profiler should really be improved to provide more information about unattributed time spent in internal Matlab code, to provide users clues that would help them reduce it. Some information could be gained by using the Profiler’s -detail builtin input args (which was documented until several releases ago, but then apparently became unsupported). I think that the Profiler should still be made to provide better insights in such cases.

Oh, and did I mention already the nice work MathWorks did with 15b’s LXE? Matlab’s JIT replacement was many years in the making, possibly since the mid 2000’s. We now see just the tip of the iceberg of this new engine: I hope that additional benefits will become apparent in future releases.

For a definitive benchmark of Matlab’s function-call overheads in various variants, readers are referred to Andrew Janke’s excellent utility (with some pre-15b usage results and analysis). Running this benchmark on my machine shows significant overhead reduction in function-call overheads in 15b in many (but not all) invocation types.

For those people wondering, 15b’s LXE does improve HG2’s performance, but just by a small bit – still not enough to offset the large performance hit of HG2 vs. HG1 in several key aspects. MathWorks is actively working to improve HG2’s performance, but unfortunately there is still no breakthrough as of 15b.

Additional details on various performance issues related to Matlab function calls (and graphics and anything else in Matlab) can be found in my recent book, Accelerating MATLAB Performance.

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Related posts:
1. Multi-column (grid) legend This article explains how to use undocumented axes listeners for implementing multi-column plot legends...
2. Plot LimInclude properties The plot objects' XLimInclude, YLimInclude, ZLimInclude, ALimInclude and CLimInclude properties are an important feature, that has both functional and performance implications....
3. FIG files format FIG files are actually MAT files in disguise. This article explains how this can be useful in Matlab applications....
4. Handle Graphics Behavior HG behaviors are an important aspect of Matlab graphics that enable custom control of handle functionality. ...

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One of my clients recently asked me to solve a very peculiar problem: He had several axes and was using Matlab’s builtin linkaxes function to link their axis limits. However, it didn’t behave quite the way that he expected. His axes were laid out as 2×2 subplots, and he wanted the two columns to be independently linked in the X axis, and the two rows to be independently linked in the Y axis:

% Prepare the axes ax(1,1) = subplot(2,2,1); ax(1,2) = subplot(2,2,2); ax(2,1) = subplot(2,2,3); ax(2,2) = subplot(2,2,4);   % Plot something x = 0 : 0.01 : 10; line(x, sin(x), 'Parent',ax(1,1)); line(x, sin(2*x), 'Parent',ax(1,2)); line(x, cos(x), 'Parent',ax(2,1)); line(x, cos(5*x), 'Parent',ax(2,2));   % Link the relevant axes linkaxes(ax(:,1),'x'); % left column linkaxes(ax(:,2),'x'); % right column linkaxes(ax(1,:),'y'); % top row linkaxes(ax(2,:),'y'); % bottom row

The problem was that the plots didn’t behave as expected: when zooming in on the bottom-left axes, for example, only the bottom-right axes was updated (Y-limits synced), whereas the top-left axes’ X-limits remained unchanged:

Apparently, the second set of two linkaxes commands (to sync the rows’ Y-limits) overrode the first set of two linkaxes commands (to sync the columns’ X-limits).

### Analysis

The reason for this unexpected behavior is that under the hood, linkaxes attaches property-change listeners to the corresponding axes, and stores these listeners in the axes’ hidden ApplicationData property (which is typically accessible via the getappdata / setappdata / isappdata / rmappdata set of functions). Specifically, up to a certain Matlab release (R2013b?), the listeners were placed in a field called ‘listener__’, and since then in a field called ‘graphics_linkaxes’. In either case, the field name was constant.

Therefore, when we placed the first set of linkaxes commands, the axes were correctly synced vertically (ax(1,1) with ax(2,1) in their X-limits, and similarly ax(1,2) with ax(2,2)). But when we placed the second set of linkaxes commands, the internal field in the axes’ ApplicationData property was overriden with the new listeners (that synced the rows’ Y-limits).

It so happens that Matlab listeners have a very nasty feature of being deleted when they are no longer referenced anywhere (within a workspace variable or object property). So when we overrode the first set of listener handles, we effectively deleted them, as if they were never set in the first place.

Some people may possibly complain about both issues at this point:

• That Matlab listeners get deleted so easily without so much as a console warning, and certainly against naive intuition.
• That repeated calls to linkaxes should override (rather than complement) each other.

As a side note, the addlistener function creates a listener and then persists it in the object’s hidden AutoListeners__ property. However, unlike the linkaxes behavior, addlistener‘s listener handles are always appended to AutoListeners__‘s contents, rather than replacing it. This ensures that all listeners are accessible and active until their container is deleted or they are specifically modified/removed. I wish that linkaxes used this mechanism, rather than its current ApplicationData one.

Luckily, there is a very easy and simple workaround, namely to use linkprop rather than linkaxes. The linkprop function is a lower-level function that creates a property-change listener that syncs corresponding properties in any specified array of object handles. In fact, linkaxes uses linkprop in order to create the necessary listeners. In our case, we can use linkprop directly, to independently attach such listeners to the axes’ XLim and YLim properties. We just need to ensure that all these listeners remain accessible to Matlab throughout the corresponding objects’ life-cycle. This is easily done using ApplicationData, as is done by linkaxes.m but in a smarter manner that does not override the previous values. The benefit of this is that when the axes are deleted, then so are the listeners; as long as the axes are accessible then so are the listeners. We just need to ensure that we don’t override these listener values:

setappdata(ax(1,1), 'YLim_listeners', linkprop(ax(1,:),'YLim')); setappdata(ax(2,1), 'YLim_listeners', linkprop(ax(2,:),'YLim')); setappdata(ax(1,1), 'XLim_listeners', linkprop(ax(:,1),'XLim')); setappdata(ax(1,2), 'XLim_listeners', linkprop(ax(:,2),'XLim'));

This results in the expected behavior:

### Conclusions

The design decision by MathWorks to automatically delete Matlab listeners as soon as their reference count is zeroed and they get garbage-collected, causes a myriad of unexpected run-time behaviors, one of which is exemplified in today’s post on linkaxes. This would still have not caused any problem had the developers of linkaxes been aware of this listener feature and taken care to store the linked listener handles in an accumulating repository (e.g., adding the listener handle to an array of existing handles, rather than replacing a scalar handle).

Luckily, now that we know how Matlab listeners behave, we can easily identify abnormal behavior that results from listener handles going out of scope, and can easily take steps to persist the handles somewhere, so that they will remain active.

I wish to stress here that the listeners’ limited scope is fully documented in several places in the documentation (e.g., here as well as the linkprop doc page). The non-additive behavior of linkaxes is also documented, albeit in an almost-invisible footnote on its doc-page.

However, I humbly contend that the fact that these behaviors are documented doesn’t meant that they are correct. After all, figure windows or timers aren’t deleted when their handle goes out of scope, are they? At the very least, I hope that MathWorks will improve the relevant doc pages, to highlight these non-intuitive behaviors, and in the case of linkaxes to present a linkprop usage example as a workaround.

If you are interested in the topic of Matlab listeners, note that I’ve written quite a few listener-related posts over the years (about property-change listeners as well as event listeners). I urge you to take a look at the list of related articles presented below, or to use the search box at the top of the page.

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Persisting transparent colors in HG2https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/persisting-transparent-colors-in-hg2 https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/persisting-transparent-colors-in-hg2#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2015 18:00:49 +0000 http://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=5820

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3. Customizing axes rulers HG2 axes can be customized in numerous useful ways. This article explains how to customize the rulers. ...
4. Customizing axes part 2 Matlab HG2 axes can be customized in many different ways. This article explains some of the undocumented aspects. ...

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Several months ago, I showed how we can set semi- and fully-transparent colors in HG2 (Matlab’s new graphics engine, starting in R2014b) for multiple graphic objects, including plot lines, plot markers, and area charts:

hLine = plot([0,150], [-0.5,0.5], 'r'); box off; hold on; ydata = sin(0:0.1:15); hArea = area(ydata); drawnow; pause(0.05); % this is important! hArea.Face.ColorType = 'truecoloralpha'; hArea.Face.ColorData(4) = 40; % 40/255 = 0.16 opacity = 84% transparent

Unfortunately, these settings are automatically overridden by Matlab when the figure is printed, saved, or exported:

% These commands result in an opaque (non-transparent) plot print(gcf); saveas(gcf, 'plot.png');

Area plot: transparent (ok) and opaque (not ok)

In some cases, the settings are lost even when the figure or axes is resized, or properties (e.g., Box) are changed. This is evident, for example, when the hLine plot line is not drawn, only the area plot.

The solution of one blog reader here was to simply set the undocumented color transparency settings at the very end of the graphics set-up. However, as noted, this still does not answer the need to preserve the color settings when the figure is printed, saved, exported, or resized, or when axes properties change.

Another reader, Richard de Garis of Collins Capital, found an undocumented feature that seems to solve the problem for good. It turns out that the solution is simply to set the color to a “legal” (documented, non-transparent) color before setting the transparency values:

hArea = area(ydata); hArea.FaceColor = 'b'; % or any other non-transparent colordrawnow; pause(0.05); % this is important! hArea.Face.ColorType = 'truecoloralpha'; hArea.Face.ColorData(4) = 40; % 40/255 = 0.16 opacity = 84% transparent

Now the transparency settings are preserved, even when the figure is printed, saved, exported, resized etc.

The obvious explanation is that by manually updating the graphic object’s FaceColor, Matlab automatically updates the hidden property FaceColorMode from ‘auto’ to ‘manual’. This signals the graphics engine not to override the Face‘s color when such an update would otherwise be called for. The mechanism of having a <PropName>Mode property associated with the <PropName> was used in HG1 (Matlab’s previous Matlab graphics engine, up to R2014a). In HG2, more properties have added such associated *Mode properties. In most cases, these additional *Mode properties are hidden, as FaceColorMode is. I find this justified, because in most cases users shouldn’t update these properties, and should let Matlab handle the logic.

Unfortunately, this explanation is apparently false, as evident by the fact that setting FaceColorMode from ‘auto’ to ‘manual’ does not have the same desired effect. So for now I don’t know how to explain this phenomenon. At least we know it works, even if we don’t fully understand why [yet]. Oh well, I guess we can’t win ’em all…

Have you discovered and used some other interesting undocumented feature of HG2? If so, please share it in a comment below, or email me the details.

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Undocumented HG2 graphics eventshttps://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/undocumented-hg2-graphics-events https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/undocumented-hg2-graphics-events#comments Wed, 27 May 2015 17:20:10 +0000 http://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=5806

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2. Introduction to UDD UDD classes underlie many of Matlab's handle-graphics objects and functionality. This article introduces these classes....
3. Multi-column (grid) legend This article explains how to use undocumented axes listeners for implementing multi-column plot legends...
4. Draggable plot data-tips Matlab's standard plot data-tips can be customized to enable dragging, without being limitted to be adjacent to their data-point. ...

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R2014b brought a refreshing new graphics engine and appearance, internally called HG2 (the official marketing name is long and impossible to remember, and certainly not as catchy). I’ve already posted a series of articles about HG2. Today I wish to discuss an undocumented aspect of HG2 that I’ve encountered several times over the past months, and most recently today. The problem is that while in the previous HG1 system (R2014a and earlier) we could add property-change listener callbacks to practically any graphics object, this is no longer true for HG2. Many graphics properties, that are calculated on-the-fly based on other property values, cannot be listened-to, and so we cannot attach callbacks that trigger when their values change.

### Property-change listeners in HG1

Take for example my post about setting axes tick labels format from 3 years ago: the idea there was to attach a Matlab callback function to the PropertyPostSet event of the XTick, YTick and/or ZTick properties, so that when they change their values (upon zoom/pan/resize), the corresponding tick-labels would be reformatted based on the user-specified format:

Formatted labels, automatically updated

A simple HG1 usage might look as follows:

addlistener(handle(hAxes), 'YTick', 'PostSet', @reformatTickLabels);   function reformatTickLabels(hProperty, eventData) try hAxes = eventData.AffectedObject; catch hAxes = ancestor(eventData.Source,'Axes'); end tickValues = get(hAxes, 'YTick'); tickLabels = arrayfun(@(x)(sprintf('%.1fV',x)), tickValues, 'UniformOutput',false); set(hAxes, 'YTickLabel', tickLabels) end

I prepared a utility called ticklabelformat that automates much of the set-up above. Feel free to download this utility from the Matlab File Exchange. Its usage syntax is as follows:

ticklabelformat(gca,'y','%.6g V') % sets y axis on current axes to display 6 significant digits ticklabelformat(gca,'xy','%.2f') % sets x & y axes on current axes to display 2 decimal digits ticklabelformat(gca,'z',@myCbFcn) % sets a function to update the Z tick labels on current axes ticklabelformat(gca,'z',{@myCbFcn,extraData}) % sets an update function as above, with extra data

### Property-change listeners in HG2

Unfortunately, this fails in HG2 when trying to listen to automatically-recalculated (non-Observable) properties such as the Position or axes Tick properties. We can only listen to non-calculated (Observable) properties such as Tag or YLim. Readers might think that this answers the need, since the ticks change when the axes limits change. This is true, but does not cover all cases. For example, when we resize/maximize the figure, Matlab may decide to modify the displayed ticks, although the axes limits remain unchanged.

So we need to have a way to monitor changes even in auto-calculated properties. Luckily this can be done by listening to a set of new undocumented HG2 events. It turns out that HG2’s axes (matlab.graphics.axis.Axes objects) have no less than 17 declared events, and 14 of them are hidden in R2015a:

>> events(gca) % list the non-hidden axes events Events for class matlab.graphics.axis.Axes: ObjectBeingDestroyed PropertyAdded PropertyRemoved   >> mc = metaclass(gca) mc = GraphicsMetaClass with properties: Name: 'matlab.graphics.axis.Axes' Description: 'TODO: Fill in Description' DetailedDescription: '' Hidden: 0 Sealed: 1 Abstract: 0 Enumeration: 0 ConstructOnLoad: 1 HandleCompatible: 1 InferiorClasses: {0x1 cell} ContainingPackage: [1x1 meta.package] PropertyList: [414x1 meta.property] MethodList: [79x1 meta.method] EventList: [17x1 meta.event] EnumerationMemberList: [0x1 meta.EnumeratedValue] SuperclassList: [7x1 meta.class]   >> mc.EventList(10) ans = event with properties: Name: 'MarkedClean' Description: 'description' DetailedDescription: 'detailed description' Hidden: 1 NotifyAccess: 'public' ListenAccess: 'public' DefiningClass: [1x1 matlab.graphics.internal.GraphicsMetaClass]   >> [{mc.EventList.Name}; ... {mc.EventList.ListenAccess}; ... arrayfun(@mat2str, [mc.EventList.Hidden], 'Uniform',false)]' ans = 'LocationChanged' 'public' 'true' 'SizeChanged' 'public' 'true' 'ClaReset' 'public' 'true' 'ClaPreReset' 'public' 'true' 'Cla' 'public' 'true' 'ObjectBeingDestroyed' 'public' 'false' % not hidden 'Hit' 'public' 'true' 'LegendableObjectsUpdated' 'public' 'true' 'MarkedDirty' 'public' 'true' 'MarkedClean' 'public' 'true' 'PreUpdate' 'protected' 'true' 'PostUpdate' 'protected' 'true' 'Error' 'public' 'true' 'Reparent' 'public' 'true' 'Reset' 'public' 'true' 'PropertyAdded' 'public' 'false' % not hidden 'PropertyRemoved' 'public' 'false' % not hidden

Similar hidden events exist for all HG2 graphics objects. The MarkedDirty and MarkedClean events are available for practically all graphic objects. We can listen to them (luckily, their ListenAccess meta-property is defined as ‘public’) to get a notification whenever the corresponding object (axes, or any other graphics component such as a plot-line or axes ruler etc.) is being redrawn. We can then refresh our own properties. It makes sense to attach such callbacks to MarkedClean rather than MarkedDirty, because the property values are naturally stabled and reliable only after MarkedClean. In some specific cases, we might wish to listen to one of the other events, which luckily have meaningful names.

For example, in my ticklabelformat utility I’ve implemented the following code (simplified here for readability – download the utility to see the actual code), which listens to the MarkedClean event on the axes’ YRuler property:

try % HG1 (R2014a or older) hAx = handle(hAxes); hProp = findprop(hAx, 'YTick'); hListener = handle.listener(hAx, hProp, 'PropertyPostSet', @reformatTickLabels); setappdata(hAxes, 'YTickListener', hListener); % must be persisted in order to remain in effect catch % HG2 (R2014b or newer) addlistener(hAx, 'YTick', 'PostSet', @reformatTickLabels);   % *Tick properties don't trigger PostSet events when updated automatically in R2014b %addlistener(hAx, 'YLim', 'PostSet', @reformatTickLabels); % this solution does not cover all use-cases addlistener(hAx.YRuler, 'MarkedClean', @reformatTickLabels); end   % Adjust tick labels now reformatTickLabels(hAxes);

In some cases, the triggered event might pass some useful information in the eventData object that is passed to the callback function as the second input parameter. This data may be different for different events, and is also highly susceptible to changes across Matlab releases, so use with care. I believe that the event names themselves (MarkedClean etc.) are less susceptible to change across Matlab releases, but they might.

### Performance aspects

The MarkedClean event is triggered numerous times, from obvious triggers such as calling drawnow to less-obvious triggers such as resizing the figure or modifying a plot-line’s properties. We therefore need to be very careful that our callback function is (1) non-reentrant, (2) is not active too often (e.g., more than 5 times per sec), (3) does not modify properties unnecessarily, and in general (4) executes as fast as possible. For example:

function reformatTickLabels(hProperty, eventData) persistent inCallback if ~isempty(inCallback), return; end inCallback = 1; % prevent callback re-entry (not 100% fool-proof)   % Update labels only every 0.2 secs or more persistent lastTime try tnow = datenummx(clock); % fast catch tnow = now; % slower end ONE_SEC = 1/24/60/60; if ~isempty(lastTime) && tnow - lastTime < 0.2*ONE_SEC inCallback = []; % re-enable callback return; end lastTime = tnow;   % This is the main callback logic try hAxes = eventData.AffectedObject; catch hAxes = ancestor(eventData.Source,'Axes'); end prevTickValues = getappdata(hAxes, 'YTick'); tickValues = get(hAxes, 'YTick'); if ~isequal(prevTickValues, tickValues) tickLabels = arrayfun(@(x)(sprintf('%.1fV',x)), tickValues, 'UniformOutput',false); set(hAxes, 'YTickLabel', tickLabels) end   inCallback = []; % re-enable callback end

Unfortunately, it seems that retrieving some property values (such as the axes’s YTick values) may by itself trigger the MarkedClean event for some reason that eludes my understanding (why should merely getting the existing values modify the graphics in any way?). Adding callback re-entrancy checks as above might alleviate the pain of such recursive callback invocations.

A related performance aspect is that it could be better to listen to a sub-component’s MarkedClean than to the parent axes’ MarkedClean, which might be triggered more often, for changes that are entirely unrelated to the sub-component that we wish to monitor. For example, if we only monitor YRuler, then it makes no sense to listen to the parent axes’ MarkedClean event that might trigger due to a change in the XRuler.

In some cases, it may be better to listen to specific events rather than the all-encompassing MarkedClean. For example, if we are only concerned about changes to the Position property, we should listen to the LocationChanged and/or SizeChanged events (more details).

Additional graphics-related performance tips can be found in my Accelerating MATLAB Performance book.

Have you used MarkedClean or some other undocumented HG2 event in your code for some nice effect? If so, please share your experience in a comment below.

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copyobj behavior change in HG2https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/copyobj-behavior-change-in-hg2 https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/copyobj-behavior-change-in-hg2#respond Wed, 13 May 2015 16:00:49 +0000 http://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=5797

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2. Performance: accessing handle properties Handle object property access (get/set) performance can be significantly improved using dot-notation. ...
3. uicontextmenu performance Matlab uicontextmenus are not automatically deleted with their associated objects, leading to leaks and slow-downs. ...
4. Graphic sizing in Matlab R2015b Matlab release R2015b's new "DPI-aware" nature broke some important functionality. Here's what can be done... ...

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As a followup to last-week’s post on class-object and generic data copies, I would like to welcome back guest blogger Robert Cumming, who developed a commercial Matlab GUI framework. Today, Robert will highlight a behavior change of Matlab’s copyobj function in HG2.

One of the latest features that was introduced to the GUI Toolbox was the ability to undock or copy panels, that would be displayed in a standalone figure window, but remain connected to the underlying class object:

Panel copy in the GUI framework toolbox

These panel copies had to remain fully functional, including all children and callbacks, and they needed to retain all connections back to the source data. In the example above I have altered the plot to show that it’s an actual copy of the data, but has separate behavior from the original panel.

To simply undock a uipanel to a new figure, we can simply re parent it by updating its Parent property to the new figure handle. To make a copy we need to utilize the copyobj function, rather than re-parenting. copyobj can be used to make a copy of all graphic objects that are “grouped” under a common parent, placing their copy in a new parent. In HG2 (R2014b onwards) the default operation of copyobj has changed.

When I started developing this feature everything looked okay and all the objects appeared copied. However, none of the callbacks were functional and all the information stored in the object’s ApplicationData was missing.

I had used copyobj in the past, so I knew that it originally worked ok, so I investigated what was happening. Matlab’s documentation for HG2 code transition suggests re-running the original code to create the second object to populate the callbacks. Unfortunately, this may not be suitable in all cases. Certainly in this case it would be much harder to do, than if the original callbacks had been copied directly. Another suggestion is to use the new ‘lagacy’ option’:

copyobj(___,’legacy’) copies object callback properties and object application data. This behavior is consistent with versions of copyobj before MATLAB® release R2014b.

So, instead of re-running the original code to create the second object to populate the callbacks, we can simply use the new ‘legacy’ option to copy all the callbacks and ApplicationData:

copyobj(hPanel, hNewParent, 'legacy')

Note: for some reason, this new ‘legacy’ option is mentioned in both the doc page and the above-mentioned HG2 code-transition page, but not in the often used help section (help copyobj). There is also no link to the relevant HG2 code-transition page in either the help section or the doc page. I find it unfortunate that for such a backward-incompatible behavior change, MathWorks has not seen fit to document the information more prominently.

Other things to note (this is probably not an exhaustive list…) when you are using copyobj:

• Any event listeners won’t be copied
• Any uicontextmenus will not be copied – it will in fact behave strangely due to the fact that it will have the uicontextmenu – but the parent is the original figure – and when you right-click on the object it will change the figure focus. For example:
hFig= figure; ax = axes; uic = uicontextmenu ('parent', hFig); uim = uimenu('label','My Label', 'parent',uic); ax.UIContextMenu = uic;   copyChildren = copyobj (ax, hFig, 'legacy');   hFig2 = figure; copyChildren.Parent = hFig2;

Another note on undocked copies – you will need to manage your callbacks appropriately so that the callbacks manage whether they are being run by the original figure or in a new undocked figure.

### Conclusions

1. copyobj has changed in HG2 – but the “legacy” switch allows you to use it as before.
2. It is unfortunate that backward compatibility was not fully preserved (nor documented enough) in HG2, but at least we have an escape hatch in this case.
3. Take care with the legacy option as you may need to alter uicontextmenus and re-attach listeners as required.
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Undocumented view transformation matrixhttps://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/undocumented-view-transformation-matrix https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/undocumented-view-transformation-matrix#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2015 21:21:51 +0000 http://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=5711

Related posts:
1. Multi-column (grid) legend This article explains how to use undocumented axes listeners for implementing multi-column plot legends...
2. Getting default HG property values Matlab has documented how to modify default property values, but not how to get the full list of current defaults. This article explains how to do this. ...
3. Customizing axes part 3 – Backdrop Matlab HG2 axes can be customized in many different ways. This article explains some of the undocumented aspects. ...
4. Customizing axes part 4 – additional properties Matlab HG2 axes can be customized in many different ways. This article explains some of the undocumented aspects. ...

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Everyone knows Matlab’s view function, right? You know, the function that can set a 3D plot to the proper orientation angles and/or return the current plot’s azimuth/elevation angles. I’ve used it numerous times myself in the past two decades. It’s one of Matlab’s earliest functions, dating back to at least 1984. Still, as often as I’ve used it, it was not until I came across Bruce Elliott’s post on CSSM last week that I realized that this seamingly-innocent stock Matlab function holds a few interesting secrets.

### view()’s transformation matrix output

First, while view‘s 2-output syntax ([az,el]=view()) is well known and documented, there is also a single-output syntax (T=view()) that is neither. To be exact, this syntax is not mentioned in the official documentation pages, but it does appear in the help section of view.m, which is viewable (no pun intended…) if you type the following in your Matlab console (R2014a or earlier, note the highlighted lines):

>> help view view 3-D graph viewpoint specification. view(AZ,EL) and view([AZ,EL]) set the angle of the view from which an observer sees the current 3-D plot. AZ is the azimuth or horizontal rotation and EL is the vertical elevation (both in degrees). Azimuth revolves about the z-axis, with positive values indicating counter- clockwise rotation of the viewpoint. Positive values of elevation correspond to moving above the object; negative values move below. view([X Y Z]) sets the view angle in Cartesian coordinates. The magnitude of vector X,Y,Z is ignored.   Here are some examples:   AZ = -37.5, EL = 30 is the default 3-D view. AZ = 0, EL = 90 is directly overhead and the default 2-D view. AZ = EL = 0 looks directly up the first column of the matrix. AZ = 180 is behind the matrix.   view(2) sets the default 2-D view, AZ = 0, EL = 90. view(3) sets the default 3-D view, AZ = -37.5, EL = 30.   [AZ,EL] = view returns the current azimuth and elevation.   T = view returns the current general 4-by-4 transformation matrix.  view(AX,...) uses axes AX instead of the current axes.   See also viewmtx, the axes Properties view, Xform.  Reference page in Help browser doc view   >> surf(peaks); T=view T = 0.79335 -0.60876 0 -0.092296 0.30438 0.39668 0.86603 -0.78354 0.5272 0.68706 -0.5 8.3031 0 0 0 1

Note that the extra highlighted information is probably a documentation oversight by some MathWorker many years ago, since it was removed from the help section in R2014b and does not appear in the doc pages (not even in R2014a). Perhaps it was documented in the early years but then someone for who-knows-what-reason decided that it shouldn’t be, and then forgot to remove all the loose ends until R2014b. Or maybe it was this way from the very beginning, I don’t know.

In any case, just to be clear on this, the transformation matrix out is still returned by view in the latest Matlab release (R2015a), just as it has for the past who-knows-how-many releases.

There are several interesting things to note here:

### view()’s vs. viewmtx()’s transformation matrices

First, MathWorks have still not done a good job of removing all loose ends. Specifically, the T=view syntax is discussed in the doc page (and help section) of the viewmtx function.

To make things worse (and even more confusing), the usage example shown in that doc page is wrong: it says that view(az,el); T=view returns the same transformation matrix T as T=viewmtx(az,el). Close, but not the same:

>> view(30,60); T=view T = 0.86603 0.5 0 -0.68301 -0.43301 0.75 0.5 -0.40849 -0.25 0.43301 -0.86603 9.0018 0 0 0 1 >> T2=viewmtx(30,60) T2 = 0.86603 0.5 0 0 -0.43301 0.75 0.5 0 0.25 -0.43301 0.86603 0 0 0 0 1

Tough luck I guess for anyone who relies on viewmtx‘s output for complex 3D graphics…

T and T2 appear to be related via a transformation matrix (XT=[1,0,0,0; 0,1,0,0; 0,0,-1,0; 0,0,0,1], we’ll use it again below) that fixes the signs of the first 3 columns, and another translation matrix (camera viewpoint?) that provides the 4th column of T.

### HG1’s undocumented axes transformation properties

Another tidbit that should never have been placed in view‘s help section in the first place, is the reference to the axes property Xform (read: “transform”, not “X-Form”). Xform is a hidden undocumented property, and as far as I can tell has always been this way. It is therefore surprising to see it mentioned in the official help section of a highly-visible function such as view. In fact, I don’t remember any other similar case.

In HG1 (R2014a and earlier), the axes’ Xform property held the transformation matrix that view returns. Alongside Xform, the HG1 axes contained several additional transformation vectors (x_RenderOffset, x_RenderScale) and matrices (x_NormRenderTransform, x_ProjectionTransform, x_RenderTransform, x_ViewPortTransform, x_ViewTransform – the latter (x_ViewTransform) is the same as Xform) that could be used for various purposes (example, technical details). All of these properties were removed in HG2 (R2014b or newer).

A complete usage example for some of these properties can be found in MathWorker Joe Conti’s select3d utility, which was removed from the File exchange, but can still be found online (note that it croacks on HG2=R2014b+ due to the removal of the hidden properties):

function [p] = local_Data2PixelTransform(ax,vert) % Transform vertices from data space to pixel space.   % Get needed transforms xform = get(ax,'x_RenderTransform'); offset = get(ax,'x_RenderOffset'); scale = get(ax,'x_RenderScale');   % Equivalent: nvert = vert/scale - offset; nvert(:,1) = vert(:,1)./scale(1) - offset(1); nvert(:,2) = vert(:,2)./scale(2) - offset(2); nvert(:,3) = vert(:,3)./scale(3) - offset(3);   % Equivalent xvert = xform*xvert; w = xform(4,1) * nvert(:,1) + xform(4,2) * nvert(:,2) + xform(4,3) * nvert(:,3) + xform(4,4); xvert(:,1) = xform(1,1) * nvert(:,1) + xform(1,2) * nvert(:,2) + xform(1,3) * nvert(:,3) + xform(1,4); xvert(:,2) = xform(2,1) * nvert(:,1) + xform(2,2) * nvert(:,2) + xform(2,3) * nvert(:,3) + xform(2,4);   % w may be 0 for perspective plots ind = find(w==0); w(ind) = 1; % avoid divide by zero warning xvert(ind,:) = 0; % set pixel to 0   p(:,1) = xvert(:,1) ./ w; p(:,2) = xvert(:,2) ./ w;

We could even set these hidden properties directly, as Bruno Luong showed back in 2009 (the bug he reported in the R2009b prerelease was temporary, it still worked ok in R2014a):

set(gca,'Xform',eye(4))

### HG2’s transformations

In HG2 (R2014b onward), we no longer have access to the hidden properties above. I’m still not exactly sure how to get all the transformations above, but at least the following can be used to replicate the transformation matrix T:

% "standard" way to get the transformation matrix T = view;   % internal way XT = [1,0,0,0; 0,1,0,0; 0,0,-1,0; 0,0,0,1]; hCamera = get(gca, 'Camera'); T = XT * GetViewMatrix(hCamera);

I’m guessing there are probably similar ways to get the other transformation matrices, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. Anyone who is up to the task is welcome to leave a comment below. Don’t come asking for my help here – I’m off to solve another puzzle. After all, there’s only a week left before my next blog post is due, so I better get started.

In summary, MathWorks have apparently done some cleanup for the new HG2 in R2014b, but I guess there’s still some work left to do (at least on the documentation). More importantly, much more work is needed to provide simple documented/supported ways of doing 3D transformations without banging our heads at all these hidden corners. Or maybe there already is such a way and I’m simply not aware of it, there’s always that possibility…

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Plot legend titlehttps://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/plot-legend-title https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/plot-legend-title#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2015 19:21:26 +0000 http://undocumentedmatlab.com/?p=5674

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This blog post was supposed to be a piece of cake: The problem description was that we wish to display a text title next to the legend box in plot axes. Sounds simple enough. After all, in HG1 (R2014a and earlier), a legend was a simple wrapper around a standard Matlab axes. Therefore, we can simply access the legend axes’s title handle, and modify its properties. This works very well in HG1:

hold all; hLine1 = plot(1:5); hLine2 = plot(2:6); hLegend = legend([hLine1,hLine2], 'Location','NorthWest'); hTitle = get(hLegend,'title'); set(hTitle, 'String','Plot types:', 'VerticalAlignment','middle', 'FontSize',8);

Matlab HG1 legend with title

### HG2

How hard then could a corresponding solution be in HG2 (R2014b+), right?

Well, it turns out that hard enough (at least for me)…

In this blog I’ve presented ~300 posts so far that discuss solutions to problems. Readers of this blog always hear the success stories, and might mistakenly think that every problem has a similarly simple solution that can be hacked away in a few lines of nifty code.

Well, the truth must be told that for each investigation that yields such a success story, there is at least one other investigation in which I failed to find a solution, no matter how hard I tried or countless hours spent digging (this is not to say that the success stories are easy – distilling a solution to a few lines of code often takes hours of research). In any case, maybe some of these problems for which I have not found a solution do have one that I have simply not discovered, and maybe they don’t – in most likelihood I will never know.

This is yet another example of such a spectacular failure on my part. Try as I may in HG2, I could find no internal handle anywhere to the legend’s axes or title handle. As far as I could tell, HG2’s legend is a standalone object of class matlab.graphics.illustration.Legend that derives from exactly the same superclasses as axes:

 >> sort(superclasses('matlab.graphics.axis.Axes')) ans = 'JavaVisible' 'dynamicprops' 'handle' 'matlab.graphics.Graphics' 'matlab.graphics.GraphicsDisplay' 'matlab.graphics.internal.GraphicsJavaVisible' 'matlab.mixin.CustomDisplay' 'matlab.mixin.Heterogeneous' 'matlab.mixin.SetGet' >> sort(superclasses('matlab.graphics.illustration.Legend')) ans = 'JavaVisible' 'dynamicprops' 'handle' 'matlab.graphics.Graphics' 'matlab.graphics.GraphicsDisplay' 'matlab.graphics.internal.GraphicsJavaVisible' 'matlab.mixin.CustomDisplay' 'matlab.mixin.Heterogeneous' 'matlab.mixin.SetGet'

This make sense, since they share many properties/features. But it also means that legends are apparently not axes but rather unrelated siblings. As such, if MathWorks chose to remove the Title property from the legend object, we will never find it.

### So what can we do in HG2?

Well, we can always resort to the poor-man’s solution of an optical illusion: displaying a an invisible axes object having the same Position as the legend box, with an axes title. We attach property listeners on the legend’s Units, Position and Visible properties, linking them to the corresponding axes properties, so that the title will change if and when the legend’s properties change (for example, by dragging the legend to a different location, or by resizing the figure). We also add an event listener to destroy the axes (and its title) when the legend is destroyed:

% Create the legend hLegend = legend(...); % as before   % Create an invisible axes at the same position as the legend hLegendAxes = axes('Parent',hLegend.Parent, 'Units',hLegend.Units, 'Position',hLegend.Position, ... 'XTick',[] ,'YTick',[], 'Color','none', 'YColor','none', 'XColor','none', 'HandleVisibility','off', 'HitTest','off');   % Add the axes title (will appear directly above the legend box) hTitle = title(hLegendAxes, 'Plot types:', 'FontWeight','normal', 'FontSize',8); % Default is bold-11, which is too large   % Link between some property values of the legend and the new axes hLinks = linkprop([hLegend,hLegendAxes], {'Units', 'Position', 'Visible'}); % persist hLinks, otherwise they will stop working when they go out of scope setappdata(hLegendAxes, 'listeners', hLinks);   % Add destruction event listener (no need to persist here - this is done by addlistener) addlistener(hLegend, 'ObjectBeingDestroyed', @(h,e)delete(hLegendAxes));

Matlab HG2 legend with title

Yes, this is indeed a bit of an unfortunate regression from HG1, but I currently see no other way to solve this. We can’t win ’em all… If you know a better solution, I’m all ears. Please shoot me an email, or leave a comment below.

Update: As suggested below by Martin, here is a more elegant solution, which attaches a text object as a direct child of the legend’s hidden property DecorationContainer (we cannot add it as a child of the legend since this is prevented and results in an error):

hLegend = legend(...); hlt = text(... 'Parent', hLegend.DecorationContainer, ... 'String', 'Title', ... 'HorizontalAlignment', 'center', ... 'VerticalAlignment', 'bottom', ... 'Position', [0.5, 1.05, 0], ... 'Units', 'normalized');

The title appears to stay attached to the legend and the Parent property of the text object even reports the legend object as its parent:

hLegend.Location = 'southwest'; % Test the title's attachment hlt.Parent % Returns hLegend

– thanks Martin!

Happy Passover/Easter everybody!

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