I'm trying to figure out how to plot a 1-degree resolution compass rose in matlab, that looks something similar to this:
I have tried various compass and polar plots but they don't seem to allow customizing the appearance of the scale around the plot. I can only get a basic 30 degree grid.
Update/Answers to comments:
I'm building a map using azimuthal prjection:
ax=axesm ('eqdazim', 'Frame', 'on', 'Grid', 'on')
this generates a vector image like this:
the next step is to add the shapeimage (which I already figured out) and a compass grid around it.
I want to generate a high quality/large print so I'm trying to stay in the vector format
But this does not need to be done in matlab, if there is a better tool for it. I just thought it would be easier to do the whole thing in one package. No experience with LaTeX but will look into it. A quick/scriptable process is important.
You could play with the options of
Advanced Polar Plots v2
Comprehensive Polar Plots
from the File Exchange.
e.g.: Advanced Polar Plots v2:
pp(0:1,0:1,'ThetaDirection', 'cw', ...
'ThetaStartAngle', 270, ...
'AngleStep', 1, ...
'AngleLabelStep', 10, ...
'AngleAxisStyle', '.', ...
'RingAxis', 'off')
Related
I have 3-D plot in matlab and it contain several lines. I want to draw cylinder or hollow tubes around those line. Is someone has experience of plotting several cylinder in 3-D plot?
Yes, there is a possibility. There is a possibility of everything in Matlab!
Lets Google and find: cylinder()!
Fantastic, Matlab has a function to generate cylinders!
And... That's it. Go plot them wherever you want.
Fun:
clear;clc;
cmap = hsv(10);
for ii=1:10
hold on
[X,Y,Z]=cylinder(rand(1,1)*0.4);
h=surf(X+(rand(1,1)-10)*2,Y+(rand(1,1)-10)*2,Z*rand(1,1)*10,'FaceColor',cmap(ii,:));
end
Do you know a simple way to draw arbitrary splines or lines in a plot-figure? I've got the following figure which I created in powerpoint with more or less arbitrary spline-curve (blue) but I'd like to do the same in MATLAB now because of a better look in the final plot-output.
I'm now wondering if I've got to manually "find" data-values to draw some sort of spline (which looks roughly like the blue one below) myself or if there's maybe a tool where I can simply insert some points into a plot interactively and there's a curve fitted though it to create something similar!?
The green and red lines I can figure out myself (probably also have to plot them manually, do I)?!?
Thanks in advance!
EDIT
Okay I found a way myself doing it in MATLAB to gnerate a nice spline: Use splinetool, then either use an example or import some data and then you can interactively add and delete points until your spline looks roughly like it should. Then file->print to figure and then tools->edit plot! You can then delete everything you don't need, add title, xlabel and ylabel etc. and then export it to latex with e.g. matlab2tikz :-) Very nice stuff!!
According the purpose, print nice plots for the thesis, I have some out-of-Matlab recommendations.
1) plot everything as usual, you get a figure handle and an axes handle
h = figure( ... )
a = gca
2) use the data cursor function of the figure window and interactively insert the base points for your later splines. You can additional points by right-click.
t = linspace(0,2*pi,1000);
[x y] = deal(sin(t),cos(t))
Later you delete the "visual" part of the data tip inside Illustrator/Inkscape, if you just want to keep the anchor point of the vector graphic to snap your splines.
There is also the possibility of custom data tips: Tutorial at Matlab Central
3) I once wrote a function to nicely plot Matlab figures as vector graphic based PDFs. You can specify height, width and how much white margin around you want. You just need to pass figure and axes handle and the name:
function saveFigure( fig_handle, axes_handle, name , height , width , margin)
set(axes_handle,'LooseInset',get(gca,'TightInset'));
set(fig_handle, 'Units','centimeters','PaperUnits','centimeters')
% the last two parameters of 'Position' define the figure size
set(fig_handle,'Position',[-margin -margin width height],...
'PaperPosition',[0 0 width+margin height+margin],...
'PaperSize',[width+margin height+margin],...
'PaperPositionMode','auto',...
'InvertHardcopy', 'on',...
'Renderer','painters'... %recommended if there are no alphamaps
);
saveas(fig_handle,name,'pdf')
end
4) You get a PDF you could directly use for Latex - for use in MS Office use 'emf' (
Enhanced metafile) rather than 'pdf'. Open this file with Adobe Illustrator (preferable as it offers layers) or Inkskape (Open Source).
5) The datatips are recognized as graphical objects, you can catch them and draw a spline on them. For Illustrator I'd recommend to put the spline in another layer than the actual figure. Later you can just swap the figure and give the spline new anchor points. In Inkscape you could use the grouping function to keep everything together.
6) I'd say you save a lot of time over a only-Matlab-solution. Good look!
I'm trying to do a wedge plot (right ascension vs redshift). I was thinking I could use a scatter plot in polar coordinates. The polar function in matlab seems very limited. Even this
polar(a(:,1),a(:,2),'Linewidth',1)
gives me an error:
Error using polar (line 23)
Too many input arguments.
Is there a simple way to achieve what I want using Matlab? Do you know of another software that would do it easily?
Thanks,
Mike
Matlab is quite adequate for that, I think.
As for the polar function, it seems it doesn't allow properties (such as 'linewidth') to be specified directly. But you can get a handle to the created object and then set its 'linewidth', or other properties:
h = polar(a(:,1),a(:,2));
set(h,'linewidth',1)
If you want a scatter plot, maybe you'd prefer not to have lines, but instead to plot a marker (such as a dot) at each point:
h = polar(a(:,1),a(:,2),'.');
set(h,'markersize',12)
Example:
To see a list of properties that you can set, as well as their current values, type
get(h)
I have been trying to draw arrows in Matlab in my figure but they all look terrible.
Also, I want my arrowhead to be a solid triangle, not a V.
I tried using the packages available on the Matlab File Exchange: arrow, arrows, arrows3, and probably at least one other one.
I even tried manually creating an arrow in the Matlab figure editor, but when I adjust the line width, the arrow looks like this:
I used the annotation command to create the arrow above:
annotation(gcf,'arrow',[0.621875 0.457916666666667],...
[0.205421152030217 0.40755429650614],...
'HeadLength',4,'LineWidth',5);
Here's the result trying to use the arrow package available here: Arrow.m (notice how the bottom arrow head is not perpendicular to the line:
I even tried the following and here is the result below (notice the terrible looking arrowhead):
figure
plot(1:10, 1:10)
annotation(gcf,'arrow',[0.621875 0.457916666666667],...
[0.205421152030217 0.40755429650614],...
'HeadLength',4,'LineWidth',5);
Vector graphics is hard. Though Matlab's typography is just as bad, but here's a simplistic text-based solution (I refuse to do this sort of annotation in Matlab any more):
figure
plot(1:10, 1:10)
text(5,4,'\rightarrow','FontSize',54,'Rotation',135,...
'HorizontalAlignment','center');
which yields a figure like this
Note that I have used '\leftarrow' because it points in the direction of zero degrees, which makes doing math in my head easier. This is no canned solution, you'll still need to fiddle with position to overcome the fact that Matlab is aligning this as text (see the 'Extent' and 'Margin' properties). Not surprisingly, you may see small glitches. The LaTeX interpreter can be used to obtain a different style arrow head:
text(5,4,'$\rightarrow$','FontSize',54,'Rotation',135,...
'HorizontalAlignment','center','Interpreter','latex');
I don't get the small glitches with this option, but the arrows look different (there are likely other LaTeX arrow styles that could be substituted). Changing the font may also have an effect and there are certainly other text-based arrows that could be used. More details on adding arrows can be found in this article from The MathWorks.
Another solution is to use the open-source Waterloo graphics - a library that addresses this by providing a pure Java library of 2D graphics functions that can easily be integrated in Matlab. See some examples here...
For example, try this code (after properly installing waterloo)
f = GXFigure();
x = -5:0.1:5;
gr1 = gxgca();
a1 = line(gr1, x, cos(x), 'LineSpec','-ob');
b1 = line(gr1, x, sin(x), 'LineSpec','-sg');
annotation(gr1,'arrow',[0.1 0.1],[0.4 0.4],'HeadLength',0.2,'HeadWidth', 0.5, 'LineWidth',2);
gr1.getObject().getView().autoScale();
Having worked with Matlab for more than 10 years and seeing almost zero progress in the quality of the plots (anti-aliased output to bitmap, decent looking eps-files, ...), I decided that my long time solution will be here. Some examples of decent looking arrows here, more beautiful graphs here. Unfortunately, some of the toolboxes prevent me from going completely to numpy/scipy/matplotlib. I know this is more of a rant than an answer, but that is my solution ...
Using quiver or quiver3 for 3-D plots will certainly look better than the that last arrow you made using annotation. I'm not sure it will look much better than the ones you made using the Arrow.m package though. It's possible to change the stlyes on quiver as well if you want.
I resorted to installing InkScape and drawing arrows in there. Nothing beat the simplicity and quality.
InkScape Website
When line-based arrows fail, you can always try patch-based ones:
xArrow = [0 1 1 1.2 1 1 0]; % X-coords of arrow edge points
yArrow = [-0.1 -0.1 -0.2 0 0.2 0.1 0.1]; % Y-coords of arrow edge points
hArrow = fill(xArrow,yArrow, [1 0 0]); % Plot a red arrow
axis equal % Set axis tick marks to be equal
Although more work, you can potentially parameterize the above into a function that takes a number of arguments for adjusting the scaling, aspect ratio, rotation, and position of the arrow. You can even adjust the color, edge line color, and alpha transparency.
This sort of idea appears to have been implemented by François Beauducel in his File Exchange submission ARROWS: generalized 2-D arrows plot.
There is now the DaVinci Draw toolbox (full disclosure: I wrote/sell the toolbox), which uses low-level Matlab commands like plot() and patch() to draw mid-level shapes like arrows. Example syntax:
davinci( 'arrow', 'X', [0 10], ...
'Y', [0 2], ...
'Shaft.Width', 1, ...
'Head.Length', 2.5, ...
'Color', 'w', ...
'EdgeColor', 'k', ...
'LineWidth', 2.5 )
From the documentation:
I have several sets of (x,y) data that I'd like to plot as line plots on the same figure. I have no trouble with matplotlib doing this, but I cannot get the same results with Chaco. Code and output are shown below.
My matplotlib-based code looks like this:
for track in tracks:
xw = np.array(track['xw'])
yw = np.array(track['yw'])
plt.plot(xw, yw, 'b-')
if not plt.gca().yaxis_inverted():
plt.gca().invert_yaxis()
My Chaco-based code looks like this:
for track in tracks:
x = np.array(track['xw'])
y = np.array(track['yw'])
plot = create_line_plot((x,y), color='blue', width=1.0)
plot.origin = 'top left'
container.add(plot)
if track == tracks[0]:
add_default_grids(plot)
add_default_axes(plot)
My matplotlib-based output looks like this:
My chaco-based output looks like this:
The problem with my Chaco-based code above was that I was using an OverlayPlotContainer (container). Because of this, each plot (from create_line_plot) was being drawn with its own axes rather than each plot being drawn on the same set of axes. The following works:
pd = ArrayPlotData()
plot = Plot(pd)
for ii, track in enumerate(tracks):
x = np.array(track['xw'])
y = np.array(track['yw'])
x_key = 'x'+str(ii)
y_key = 'y'+str(ii)
pd.set_data(x_key, x)
pd.set_data(y_key, y)
plot.plot((x_key, y_key), color='blue', origin='top left')
Chaco and Matplotlib are not really trying to address the same types of problems. Matplotlib is better for bringing up a quick plot in a script and is very easy to use. Chaco is a plotting framework that allows:
a stronger architecture for dealing with larger datasets more smoothly
a frameworks that makes it easy to build a GUI around the plot (Traits)
the creation of custom interactive tools on top of plots
Leveraging that framework however requires more code, and the recommeded way to build plots in Chaco is to use its Object Oriented syntax. The simplest but realistic Chaco plot would be something like this. It requires an ArrayPlotData to hold the data and a Plot object to create a plotting area and hold different ways to render that data.
You want to have many line plots instead of just one. You can simply add a for loop inside the __init__ method to add every relevant numpy array inside the ArrayPlotData and for each pair of arrays, to call the plot method of the Plot object (but only 1 Plot object is needed). Something similar is done a little further down in the page.
Good luck,