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Multi-line tooltips

Posted By Yair Altman On November 2, 2011 @ 19:05 In GUI,Low risk of breaking in future versions,Stock Matlab function,Undocumented feature | 5 Comments

I often use tooltips in my Matlab GUIs. They are a fantastically intuitive and unobtrusive visual helper for users to understand the GUI. In this blog, I have already posted several articles about how to tweak tooltip contents (here ^[1], here ^[2], and here ^[3]). Today I would like to expand on one of the aspects that were already covered, namely that of multi-line tooltips.

Basic multi-line tooltips

The basic multi-line tooltip consists of a simple string that includes the newline character. for example:

set(hControl, 'TooltipString', ['this is line 1' 10 'and this is line 2'])

Or better (platform independent):

set(hControl, 'TooltipString', sprintf('this is line 1\nand this is line 2'))

As can be seen, this is very simple to set up. Unfortunately, the font cannot be customized. Which leads us to:

HTML-rendered multi-line tooltips

Tooltips, like most other Matlab controls, supports HTML rendering ^[4]. This is a natural corollary of the fact that Java Swing, on which all Matlab controls are based, automatically supports HTML ^[5]. All we need to do is to add ‘<HTML>‘ at the very beginning of our tooltip string, and then we can embed HTML tags within the rest of the string:

set(hControl, 'tooltipString', 'line #1
line#2');

And a more sophisticated example, used within my createTable utility ^[6] on the File Exchange:

A more complex multi-line HTML-based tooltip

Note that there is no need to close the final HTML tags in the tooltip string, although it’s not an error to do so (as I have done above).

The problem with formatted multi-line tooltip

Unfortunately, none of these two methods work when we wish to display formatted multi-line tooltips. For example, suppose that we wish to display struct data in a tooltip:

>> myData = struct('a',pi, 'b',-4, 'very_long_field_name','short txt')
myData =
                       a: 3.14159265358979
                       b: -4
    very_long_field_name: 'short txt'
>> myDataStr = evalc('disp(myData)');
>> set(hControl, 'TooltipString', myDataStr);

If we try to use HTML, the result looks even worse, because if the HTML-renderer detects a newline character embedded in the string, it simply uses the regular (non-HTML) renderer:

set(hControl, 'TooltipString', ['' myDataStr ''])

Even if we fix this by replacing all line-separators with ‘<br/>‘, we still get a badly-formatted tooltip, because HTML ignores all white spaces:

>> myDataStr2 = strrep(myDataStr, sprintf('\n'), '
');
>> set(hControl, 'TooltipString', ['' myDataStr2 ''])

(you can see that it’s HTML-formatted by the fact that the tooltip contents do not have internal margins like in the non-HTML tooltip above)

Fixed-width font multi-line tooltips

We now recall the HTML <pre> tag, which tells HTML not to ignore white-spaces. In most web browsers, it also defaults to using a fixed-width font. Unfortunately, this is not the case here:

set(hControl, 'TooltipString', ['

' myDataStr2])

Which brings us to the final customization of the day, namely explicitly forcing the tooltip to use a fixed-width font:

set(hControl, 'TooltipString', ['

' myDataStr2 ''])

Finally - a well-formatted multi-line tooltip

Even more powerful customizations can be achieved using CSS rather than pure HTML. This will be discussed a future article.

5 Comments (Open | Close)

5 Comments To "Multi-line tooltips"

#1 Pingback By Undocumented Profiler options part 2 | Undocumented Matlab On September 24, 2012 @ 03:24

[…] recall my related article last year, where I showed how to convert a proportional-font multi-line tooltip […]

#2 Comment By Simon On April 29, 2019 @ 17:25

Does anyone know if multi line tooltips are possible for Digraph plots?

This strategy doesn’t appear to work…

#3 Comment By Yair Altman On June 20, 2019 @ 14:28

@Simon – I assume that you mean the data-tip that is displayed next to the nodes in a digraph plot – this is not a tooltip but a data-tip (also called a datacursor): tooltips (which are the topic of this article) are Java components that are displayed next to Java GUI controls (buttons, checkboxes, editboxes etc.). In contrast, data-tips are non-Java graphic areas that are only displayed within graphic axes and use a completely different technology. Datacursor popups are not tooltips and they do not support HTML, although they do support Tex/Latex (like other graphics/axes text objects).

Basic customizations of the data-tip text is supported and ^[13]; I described ^[14] in other articles.

#4 Comment By Ozgu On June 18, 2019 @ 22:14

Hi Yair

Can we adjust the position of the TooltipString?

#5 Comment By Yair Altman On June 20, 2019 @ 14:09

@Ozgu – you cannot control tooltip position for Matlab controls. You can only do this with custom Java components in which you overload the getToolTipLocation() method.

Basic multi-line tooltips

HTML-rendered multi-line tooltips

The problem with formatted multi-line tooltip

Fixed-width font multi-line tooltips

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