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HTML support in Matlab uicomponents

A common feature of Java Swing components is their acceptance of HTML (and CSS) for any of their JLabels. Since all Matlab uicontrols are based on Swing-derived components (an undocumented aspect), this Swing feature automatically applies to Matlab uicontrol as well. Whatever can be formatted in HTML (font, color, size, …) is inherently available in Matlab controls. Note that HTML tags do not need to be closed (<tag>…</tag>), although it is good practice to close them properly.

For example, let us create a multi-colored Matlab listbox:

uicontrol('Style','list', 'Position',[10,10,70,70], 'String', ...
{'<HTML><FONT color="red">Hello</Font></html>', 'world', ...
 '<html><font style="font-family:impact;color:green"><i>What a', ...
 '<Html><FONT color="blue" face="Comic Sans MS">nice day!</font>'});

Listbox with HTML'ed items

Listbox with HTML colored items

Menus and tooltips can also be customized in a similar fashion:

uicontrol('Style','popup', 'Position',[10,10,150,100], 'String', ...
{'<HTML><BODY bgcolor="green">green background</BODY></HTML>', ...
 '<HTML><FONT color="red" size="+2">Large red font</FONT></HTML>', ...
 '<HTML><BODY bgcolor="#FF00FF"><PRE>fixed-width font'});

Drop-down (popup uicontrol) with HTML'ed items

Drop-down (popup uicontrol) with HTML'ed items

Multi-line HTML'ed tooltip

Multi-line HTML'ed tooltip

Figure main menu modified with HTML items

Figure main menu modified with HTML items

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 3:18 pm and is filed under GUI, Low risk of breaking in future versions, UI controls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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19 Responses to “HTML support in Matlab uicomponents”

  1. Ashish Sadanandan Ashish Sadanandan says:
    March 26, 2009 at 4:22 pm

    Thanks for starting this blog Yair. It’s fun, and often necessary, to mess with Java directly when doing GUI programming in Matlab and this blog should help a lot with that.

    About displaying HTML in uicontrols, is there a way to do that with static text? Simply changing the style parameter to text in your examples does not work.

    Regards,
    Ashish.

  2. Yair Altman admin says:
    March 26, 2009 at 11:31 pm

    This is a good point, Ashish - text uicontrols use a class (com.mathworks.hg.peer.LabelPeer$1 which extends com.mathworks.hg.peer.utils.MultilineLabel) that de-HTMLs the content string for some reason that I do not understanding.

    Instead of using uicontrol(’style’,'text’,…) you could use javacomponent(’javax.swing.JLabel’), which uses a standard HTML-compliant label (the string is controlled via its ‘Text’ property).

    Yair

  3. Ashish Sadanandan Ashish Sadanandan says:
    March 27, 2009 at 10:53 am

    Perfect! That works, but I ended up using a JButton instead because I could define an ActionPerformedCallback for it, the only way I could figure out to respond to user clicks on a JLabel was to add a mouse listener and I had no idea how to do that on the Matlab side. This is the code I’m using:

    hText = javacomponent( ‘javax.swing.JButton’ );
    set( hText, ‘text’, ‘Select Variable‘ );
    set( hText, ‘BorderPainted’, false );
    set( hText, ‘ContentAreaFilled’, false );
    set( hText, ‘FocusPainted’, false );
    set( hText, ‘Opaque’, true );
    set( hText, ‘ActionPerformedCallback’, @myCallback );

    Now, the next question is, is there a way to make it behave like a HyperLink on hovering i.e. change the cursor to the hand icon, like it does in a web browser?

  4. Yair Altman admin says:
    March 28, 2009 at 10:47 am

    Ah, Ashish - this one’s easy: to change the cursor to a hand icon, simply do this:

    hText.setCursor(java.awt.Cursor.getPredefinedCursor(java.awt.Cursor.HAND_CURSOR));

    Note that in order to prevent memory leaks, it is advisable to use the jObject.setProperty() or set(handle(jObject),’Property’,…) formats, instead of set(jObject,’Property’,…).

    Yair

  5. Ashish Sadanandan Ashish Sadanandan says:
    March 30, 2009 at 9:50 am

    Thanks for the tip about using the SET function, I was digging around a little bit more about that and came up with this link:
    http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=5950839&tstart=0

    Is what he says about explicitly setting java handles to [] true? I’m not doing that at the moment, but I could stuff all the java handles into GUIDATA and set them to empty in the DeleteFcn callback for the figure containing the Java components.

    Thanks again for answering all my questions, pretty soon you’ll be able to create a new blog post from just these questions :-)

    Oh and I have some feedback about the website, it’s minor and nothing that a text editor can’t fix in a few seconds, but the code that you post cannot be copy-pasted into the Matlab command line directly because of the ‘, “, … etc. characters which instead of the ASCII versions are some HTML versions. The … for instance is a single character instead of 3 .s

  6. Ashish Sadanandan Ashish Sadanandan says:
    March 30, 2009 at 9:55 am

    Forgot to ask one more question I had. I create the JButton using javacomponent and then call the handle function before setting the ActionPerformedCallback

    hText = javacomponent( ‘javax.swing.JButton’, pos, hPanel );
    hText.setText( ‘MyButton’ );
    hText = handle( hText, ‘CallbackProperties’ );
    set( hText, ‘ActionPerformedCallback’, @VarSelectCallback );

    It seems I can move the line containing the call to the HANDLE function right after creating the JButton and then call all the methods the same way as using the handle returned by javacomponent. Is this true? Are the 2 handles equivalent (other than the fact that you should use the one returned by the HANDLE call to set the callback)?

  7. Yair Altman admin says:
    March 30, 2009 at 12:48 pm

    Deleting the java handles (or explicitly setting to []) is really important only for very heavy components (JTable/JTree with lots of data etc.) or for components that keep getting replaced with new instances for programmatic reasons. Otherwise it’s just not worth your programming time…

    Thanks for the feedback about the code snippets font - I fixed it and you can now copy-paste directly into Matlab.

    Your observation about handle() is correct. handle() is a large undocumented topic in Matlab which is on my TODO list. Basically, the handle() object is a Matlab wrapper for the Java reference, and whatever you can do with the Java ref you can do with the handle, with some differences that I’ll detail separately (probably over several posts since the topic is large).

  8. Dani Dani says:
    April 12, 2009 at 11:08 am

    Can this be used to right align text (or center) in uicontrols? On windows the HorizontalAlignment property only works for text and edit boxes. However, I could not find a html instruction that would do it (p align=right…)

  9. Yair Altman Yair Altman says:
    April 12, 2009 at 1:49 pm

    @Dani - the “normal” way to do this is to use HorizontalAlignment. In theory, you could use the style=”text-align:right;” CSS directive. However, it appears that the Java engine does not honor this CSS directive (although it does honor font size/color etc.). it doesn’t hurt to try, just don’t be surprised if it is ignored.

  10. Changing Matlab’s Command Window colors - part 2 | Undocumented Matlab Changing Matlab’s Command Window colors - part 2 | Undocumented Matlab says:
    May 9, 2009 at 12:15 pm

    [...] the Command-Window (like Swing’s standard JTextArea of which CW is an instance) does not automatically support HTML formatting as most other uicontrols. In fact, CW’s default Document object, which holds all the text-area’s text and font style information [...]

  11. Spicing up Matlab uicontrol tooltips | Undocumented Matlab Spicing up Matlab uicontrol tooltips | Undocumented Matlab says:
    May 27, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    [...] how to use tooltips in Matlab GUI. In one of this blog’s very first posts, I described how HTML can easily be used with Matlab uicontrols. Let’s now combine these ideas to show how HTML support can easily be used to spice-up the [...]

  12. Jason McMains Jason McMains says:
    July 20, 2009 at 10:53 am

    Yair, I was messing around with the JLabel HTML, and I have a few different links within it. Is there a way to allow for following these links?

  13. Yair Altman Yair Altman says:
    July 20, 2009 at 12:45 pm

    @Jason - you can indeed follow hyperlinks. For a few examples, take a look at my UIINSPECT utility on the File Exchange. Specifically, see the link at the very bottom of the figure window, and also the links within the methods pane on the top-left.

  14. Jason McMains Jason McMains says:
    July 21, 2009 at 10:07 am

    Yair, Thanks for the suggestion. Because I have multiple links, I ended up using a browser instance and inserting the html like this:

    jBrowserPanel=com.mathworks.mlwidgets.html.HTMLBrowserPanel;
browser = javacomponent(jBrowserPanel,browser_position,gcf);
html = browser.HTMLRenderer;
html.setHtmlText(message);
  15. Jason McMains Jason McMains says:
    August 19, 2009 at 6:50 am

    Just to show another usage of this topic, I’m using it as a font name chooser:

    c=listfonts;
c=cellfun(@(c) ['<html><Font face="' c '">' c '</font></html>'],c,'uni',false);
set(findobj('tag','FontName'),'string',c,'value',1)
  16. Customizing Matlab labels | Undocumented Matlab Customizing Matlab labels | Undocumented Matlab says:
    November 11, 2009 at 4:06 pm

    [...] axes text labels that support Tex/Latex, and unlike other uicontrols like buttons or listboxes that support HTML, text labels (uicontrol(’Style’,’text’,…)) do not support text formatting [...]

  17. Prasath Prasath says:
    January 6, 2010 at 5:14 am

    An example for Jbutton usage in MATLAB

    function test_javaButton
import javax.swing.JButton;
hfig = figure();
button = JButton('Close');
[hcomponent, hcontainer] = javacomponent(button, [], hfig);
set(hcontainer,'units','normalized','position',[.1 .1 .5 .5])
set(button,'ActionPerformedCallback',@buttonClosePressed);
return;
 
function buttonClosePressed(handle,event)
%doSomething();
disp('test');
return;
  18. cintix cintix says:
    January 29, 2010 at 7:37 am

    Hi,
    Is it possible to assign the color of one plot to what is written inside the listbox?I explain my application: I have an axes and a listbox, when I plot different lines, in the listbox it is shown Plot1,Plot2… and I would like those strings to have the color of its corresponding plotted line…is it possible? I just cant get it…
    Thanks in advance

  19. Yair Altman Yair Altman says:
    January 30, 2010 at 9:41 am

    @cintix - yes it is possible. You just need to remember how HTML colors are specified. Here is a very simple example that you can modify for your own needs:

    % Let's modify Plot3 for example:
color = get(hLine(3),'color');  % => [123,234,45]
colorStr = sprintf('%d,',int16(color));  % extra ',' is ok
listStrings{3} = ['<html><font color="rgb(' colorStr ')">Plot3</font></html>'];
set(hListbox,'string',listStrings);

    Yair

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