Plot LimInclude properties

Concluding my three-part mini-series on hidden and undocumented plot/axes properties, I would like to present a set of properties that I find very useful in dynamic plots: XLimInclude, YLimInclude, ZLimInclude, ALimInclude and CLimInclude. These properties, which are relevant for plot/axes objects, have an ‘on’ value by default. When set to ‘off’, they exclude their object from the automatic computation of the corresponding axes limits (XLim/YLim/ZLim/ALim/CLim).

For example, here’s a simple sine wave with a wavefront line marker. Note how the too-tall wavefront line affects the entire axes Y-limits:

cla;
t=0:.01:7.5;
plot(t,sin(t));
line('xdata',[7.5,7.5], 'ydata',[-5,5], 'color','r'); 
box off

Regular plot (YLimInclude on)

This situation is quickly fixed using the YLimInclude property:

cla;
t=0:.01:7.5;
plot(t,sin(t));
line('xdata',[7.5,7.5], 'ydata',[-5,5], 'color','r', ...
     'YLimInclude','off'); 
box off

YLimInclude off

Beside the functional importance of this feature, it also has a large potential for improved application performance: I recently designed a monitor-like GUI for a medical application, where the data is constantly updated from an external sensor connected to the computer. The GUI presents the latest 10 seconds of monitored data, which bounce up and down the chart. A red wave-front line is presented and constantly updated, to indicate the current data position. Since the monitored data jumps up and down, the Y-limits of the monitor chart often changes, and with it I would need to modify the wavefront’s YData based on the updated axes YLim. This turned out to steal precious CPU time from the actual monitoring application. Came YLimInclude to the rescue, by letting me specify the wavefront line as:

hWavefront = line(..., 'YData',[-99,99], 'YLimInclude','off');

Now the wavefront line never needed to update its YData (only XData, which is much less CPU-intensive) – it always spanned the entire axes height, since [-99,99] were assured (in my particular case) to exceed the actual monitored data. This looked better (no flicker effects) and performed faster than the regular (documented) approach.

Note that although all these properties exist, to the best of my knowledge, for all Handle-Graphic plot objects, they are sometimes meaningless. For example, ZLimInclude is irrelevant for a 2D patchless plot; CLimInclude relates to the axes color limits which are irrelevant if you’re not using a colormap or something similar; ALimInclude relates to patch transparency (alpha-channel) and is irrelevant elsewhere. In these and similar cases, setting these properties, while allowed and harmless, will simply have no effect.

This concludes my mini-series of undocumented plot/axes properties. To recap, the other articles dealt with the LooseInset and LineSmoothing properties.

Have you found other similar properties or use-cases that you find useful? I will be most interested to read about them in the comments section below.