Comments on: Plot legend customization

By: Gres

Gres — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 04:35:37 +0000

In 2018b, you can get the icons by calling [hh,icons,plots,txt] = legend({‘Line 1’});

By: Dev

Dev — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 11:42:21 +0000

Same question as sco1: Have you had luck utilizing NodeChildren to perform similar options in MATLAB >= R2017a?

By: Yair Altman

Yair Altman — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 13:40:55 +0000

In reply to Praveen. @Praveen - first note that you have to call drawnow before accessing any of the internal legend components. In addition, note that hLegend.EntryContainer.NodeChildren(1).Icon.Transform.Children.Children returns an array of objects (Marker and LineStrip) and you can only set the Size property of the Marker, not the LineStrip (duh). Here's a working example:

figure; hold all;
hLine1 = plot(1:5,'o-b'); 
hLine2 = plot(2:6,'-sr');
hLegend = legend([hLine1,hLine2], 'Location','SouthEast');
hLegend.Title.String = 'MyLegend';
drawnow;
hLegend.EntryContainer.NodeChildren(1).Icon.Transform.Children.Children(1).Size = 15;

By: Praveen

Praveen — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 17:55:23 +0000

Hi That's alright, how do I set for example, marker size in the legend, when I try to set it: hLegend.EntryContainer.NodeChildren(1).Icon.Transform.Children.Children.Size = 15; I get an error saying I can't set readonly properties, any tips how to go about that. Thanks

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 11:38:22 +0000

It would appear that if you're using these properties in a function or loop it is important to call drawnow before attempting to utilise any of the LegendEntry objects, otherwise they will not exist yet and you will get errors.

By: Yair Altman

Yair Altman — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 07:58:49 +0000

In reply to Peter Cook. @Peter - while the legend object's ItemHitFcn callback property is documented/supported, the Item property of the eventData object (which is passed to the callback function in run-time when you click a legend entry) is indeed hidden/undocumented. This eventData.Item property contains the LegendEntry item that was clicked. Thanks for pointing it out.

By: Peter Cook

Peter Cook — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 15:17:11 +0000

I have recently incorporated the Legend's ItemHitFcn callback property into a utility I built. You can access and edit some relevant objects in the callback function, e.g.

hLegend.ItemHitFcn = myLegendItemHitFcn(src,evnt);

% The following in the callback function:
evnt.Peer %access line, patch, image, GraphPlot, etc... 
evnt.Item.Label %access text object for that legend entry
src.String{evnt.Item.Index} = 'new string'; %edit the legend entry name

By: sco1

sco1 — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 01:40:39 +0000

Very interesting! I never explored NodeChildren when I was building legtools and was using PlotChildren instead to do things like rearrange the legend, add/remove entries, etc. Have you had luck utilizing NodeChildren to perform similar options in MATLAB >= R2017a? R2017a introduced AutoUpdate to legend objects which broke pretty much all of the functionality I got from manipulating PlotChildren.