Undocumented Matlab
  • SERVICES
    • Consulting
    • Development
    • Training
    • Gallery
    • Testimonials
  • PRODUCTS
    • IQML: IQFeed-Matlab connector
    • IB-Matlab: InteractiveBrokers-Matlab connector
    • EODML: EODHistoricalData-Matlab connector
    • Webinars
  • BOOKS
    • Secrets of MATLAB-Java Programming
    • Accelerating MATLAB Performance
    • MATLAB Succinctly
  • ARTICLES
  • ABOUT
    • Policies
  • CONTACT
  • SERVICES
    • Consulting
    • Development
    • Training
    • Gallery
    • Testimonials
  • PRODUCTS
    • IQML: IQFeed-Matlab connector
    • IB-Matlab: InteractiveBrokers-Matlab connector
    • EODML: EODHistoricalData-Matlab connector
    • Webinars
  • BOOKS
    • Secrets of MATLAB-Java Programming
    • Accelerating MATLAB Performance
    • MATLAB Succinctly
  • ARTICLES
  • ABOUT
    • Policies
  • CONTACT

Undocumented plot marker types

March 13, 2019 One Comment

I wanted to take a break from my miniseries on the Matlab toolstrip to describe a nice little undocumented aspect of plot line markers. Plot line marker types have remained essentially unchanged in user-facing functionality for the past two+ decades, allowing the well-known marker types (.,+,o,^ etc.). Internally, lots of things changed in the graphics engine, particularly in the transition to HG2 in R2014b and the implementation of markers using OpenGL primitives. I suspect that during the massive amount of development work that was done at that time, important functionality improvements that were implemented in the engine were forgotten and did not percolate all the way up to the user-facing functions. I highlighted a few of these in the past, for example transparency and color gradient for plot lines and markers, or various aspects of contour plots.
Fortunately, Matlab usually exposes the internal objects that we can customize and which enable these extra features, in hidden properties of the top-level graphics handle. For example, the standard Matlab plot-line handle has a hidden property called MarkerHandle that we can access. This returns an internal object that enables marker transparency and color gradients. We can also use this object to set the marker style to a couple of formats that are not available in the top-level object:

>> x=1:10; y=10*x; hLine=plot(x,y,'o-'); box off; drawnow;
>> hLine.MarkerEdgeColor = 'r';
>> set(hLine, 'Marker')'  % top-level marker styles
ans =
  1×14 cell array
    {'+'} {'o'} {'*'} {'.'} {'x'} {'square'} {'diamond'} {'v'} {'^'} {'>'} {'<'} {'pentagram'} {'hexagram'} {'none'}
>> set(hLine.MarkerHandle, 'Style')'  % low-level marker styles
ans =
  1×16 cell array
    {'plus'} {'circle'} {'asterisk'} {'point'} {'x'} {'square'} {'diamond'} {'downtriangle'} {'triangle'} {'righttriangle'} {'lefttriangle'} {'pentagram'} {'hexagram'} {'vbar'} {'hbar'} {'none'}

>> x=1:10; y=10*x; hLine=plot(x,y,'o-'); box off; drawnow; >> hLine.MarkerEdgeColor = 'r'; >> set(hLine, 'Marker')' % top-level marker styles ans = 1×14 cell array {'+'} {'o'} {'*'} {'.'} {'x'} {'square'} {'diamond'} {'v'} {'^'} {'>'} {'<'} {'pentagram'} {'hexagram'} {'none'} >> set(hLine.MarkerHandle, 'Style')' % low-level marker styles ans = 1×16 cell array {'plus'} {'circle'} {'asterisk'} {'point'} {'x'} {'square'} {'diamond'} {'downtriangle'} {'triangle'} {'righttriangle'} {'lefttriangle'} {'pentagram'} {'hexagram'} {'vbar'} {'hbar'} {'none'}

We see that the top-level marker styles directly correspond to the low-level styles, except for the low-level ‘vbar’ and ‘hbar’ styles. Perhaps the developers forgot to add these two styles to the top-level object in the enormous upheaval of HG2. Luckily, we can set the hbar/vbar styles directly, using the line’s MarkerHandle property:

hLine.MarkerHandle.Style = 'hbar';
set(hLine.MarkerHandle, 'Style','hbar');  % alternative

hLine.MarkerHandle.Style = 'hbar'; set(hLine.MarkerHandle, 'Style','hbar'); % alternative

hLine.MarkerHandle.Style='hbar'
hLine.MarkerHandle.Style='hbar'
hLine.MarkerHandle.Style='vbar'
hLine.MarkerHandle.Style='vbar'

USA visit

I will be travelling in the US in May/June 2019. Please let me know (altmany at gmail) if you would like to schedule a meeting or onsite visit for consulting/training, or perhaps just to explore the possibility of my professional assistance to your Matlab programming needs.

Related posts:

  1. Types of undocumented Matlab aspects – This article lists the different types of undocumented/unsupported/hidden aspects in Matlab...
  2. Undocumented scatter plot behavior – The scatter plot function has an undocumented behavior when plotting more than 100 points: it returns a single unified patch object handle, rather than a patch handle for each specific point as it returns with 100 or less points....
  3. Plot markers transparency and color gradient – Matlab plot-line markers can be customized to have transparency and color gradients. ...
  4. Undocumented scatter plot jitter – Matlab's scatter plot can automatically jitter data to enable better visualization of distribution density. ...
  5. Accessing hidden HG2 plot functionality – In HG2, some of the plot functionality is hidden in undocumented properties. ...
  6. Plot line transparency and color gradient – Static and interpolated (gradient) colors and transparency can be set for plot lines in HG2. ...
HG2 Hidden property Internal component Pure Matlab Undocumented feature
Print Print
« Previous
Next »
One Response
  1. Yaroslav March 14, 2019 at 14:44 Reply

    Maybe they couldn’t find a good shortcut. The natural one for hbar would be

    plot(x,y,'-');

    plot(x,y,'-');

    but it already has an interpretation (of a full line). Nonetheless, the shortcut might have been defined as

    plot(x,y,'_');

    plot(x,y,'_');

    I also don’t see any problem with the natural shortcut for vbar,

    plot(x,y,'|');

    plot(x,y,'|');

    In any case, it is a very useful feature that I will surely use in the future. Thanks, @Yair!

Leave a Reply
HTML tags such as <b> or <i> are accepted.
Wrap code fragments inside <pre lang="matlab"> tags, like this:
<pre lang="matlab">
a = magic(3);
disp(sum(a))
</pre>
I reserve the right to edit/delete comments (read the site policies).
Not all comments will be answered. You can always email me (altmany at gmail) for private consulting.

Click here to cancel reply.

Useful links
  •  Email Yair Altman
  •  Subscribe to new posts (email)
  •  Subscribe to new posts (feed)
  •  Subscribe to new posts (reader)
  •  Subscribe to comments (feed)
 
Accelerating MATLAB Performance book
Recent Posts

Speeding-up builtin Matlab functions – part 3

Improving graphics interactivity

Interesting Matlab puzzle – analysis

Interesting Matlab puzzle

Undocumented plot marker types

Matlab toolstrip – part 9 (popup figures)

Matlab toolstrip – part 8 (galleries)

Matlab toolstrip – part 7 (selection controls)

Matlab toolstrip – part 6 (complex controls)

Matlab toolstrip – part 5 (icons)

Matlab toolstrip – part 4 (control customization)

Reverting axes controls in figure toolbar

Matlab toolstrip – part 3 (basic customization)

Matlab toolstrip – part 2 (ToolGroup App)

Matlab toolstrip – part 1

Categories
  • Desktop (45)
  • Figure window (59)
  • Guest bloggers (65)
  • GUI (165)
  • Handle graphics (84)
  • Hidden property (42)
  • Icons (15)
  • Java (174)
  • Listeners (22)
  • Memory (16)
  • Mex (13)
  • Presumed future risk (394)
    • High risk of breaking in future versions (100)
    • Low risk of breaking in future versions (160)
    • Medium risk of breaking in future versions (136)
  • Public presentation (6)
  • Semi-documented feature (10)
  • Semi-documented function (35)
  • Stock Matlab function (140)
  • Toolbox (10)
  • UI controls (52)
  • Uncategorized (13)
  • Undocumented feature (217)
  • Undocumented function (37)
Tags
ActiveX (6) AppDesigner (9) Callbacks (31) Compiler (10) Desktop (38) Donn Shull (10) Editor (8) Figure (19) FindJObj (27) GUI (141) GUIDE (8) Handle graphics (78) HG2 (34) Hidden property (51) HTML (26) Icons (9) Internal component (39) Java (178) JavaFrame (20) JIDE (19) JMI (8) Listener (17) Malcolm Lidierth (8) MCOS (11) Memory (13) Menubar (9) Mex (14) Optical illusion (11) Performance (78) Profiler (9) Pure Matlab (187) schema (7) schema.class (8) schema.prop (18) Semi-documented feature (6) Semi-documented function (33) Toolbar (14) Toolstrip (13) uicontrol (37) uifigure (8) UIInspect (12) uitools (20) Undocumented feature (187) Undocumented function (37) Undocumented property (20)
Recent Comments
  • Yair Altman (13 days 9 hours ago): @Veronica – you are using the new version of uitree, which uses HTML-based uifigures, and my post was about the Java-based uitree which uses legacy Matlab figures. For...
  • Veronica Taurino (13 days 9 hours ago): >> [txt1,txt2] ans = ‘abrakadabra’
  • Veronica Taurino (13 days 10 hours ago): Hello, I am just trying to change the uitree node name as you suggested: txt1 = 'abra'; txt2 = 'kadabra'; node.setName([txt1,txt2]); >> "Unrecognized method, property, or...
  • Yair Altman (16 days 9 hours ago): The version of JGraph that you downloaded uses a newer version of Java (11) than the one that Matlab supports (8). You need to either (1) find an earlier version of JGraph that...
  • mrv (16 days 14 hours ago): hello, I used MATLAB 2019b update9, I have add jgraphx.jar to javaclassapth, and restart matlab, but still got errors below: Warning: A Java exception occurred trying to load the...
  • xuejie wu (40 days 10 hours ago): Hi: I’m wondering if i can add my customized section or tab ?
  • Yair Altman (52 days 2 hours ago): @Sagar – use the view(az,el) function to rotate the 3D axes.
  • Sagar Chawla (52 days 2 hours ago): I want to know how to change the x-axis to the z-axis. I mean the position. Like if there is a 3d animated graph then how to change position of the axis. X-axis in place of...
  • Ren (52 days 2 hours ago): I noticed that xlsread will create a hidden and never-dying special server that always has priority when actxGetRunningServer is called. So this cause a problem that no matter how many...
  • Ben Abbott (55 days 17 hours ago): Thanks Yair, it was the second. I didn’t not include the drawnow ()
  • Yair Altman (55 days 20 hours ago): @Ben – it looks perfectly ok (with color gradient and all) on my R2022a… Perhaps you missed some of the steps (e.g. setting the ColorBinding to 'interpolated') or...
  • Ben Abbott (55 days 21 hours ago): The graded color is not working for me using R2021a. The plot “HG2 plot line color, transparency gradient” looks exactly like “Transparent HG2 plot...
  • Yair Altman (78 days 23 hours ago): Oliver – you probably forgot to update hMarkers.FaceColorType to ‘truecoloralpha‘: x=1:10; y=10*x; figure; hLine = plot(x,y,'o-'); drawnow...
  • Oliver (79 days 0 hours ago): This seems to have been disabled in the most recent version of Matlab (R2021b). When I use this method the hMarker.FaceColorData does change, but the markers are not made...
  • Yair Altman (97 days 21 hours ago): @Tim – the new uidatepicker() function only works with web-based figures (created using the uifigure() function or App Designer); it is not available on the legacy...
Contact us
Undocumented Matlab © 2009 - Yair Altman
This website and Octahedron Ltd. are not affiliated with The MathWorks Inc.; MATLAB® is a registered trademark of The MathWorks Inc.
Scroll to top