I have some programs written in Matlab that I need to run several times for some reasons (debugging, testing with different input, etc...)
But, there are a lot's of graphs that are plotted by the programs and its various functions such that everytime I run the program, I have to wait for all the graphs to be displayed, which is very annoying and time consuming (especially when you are working with a small laptop).
After the program is executed, I close them with a close all.
So my question is:
Is there a way to disable all plots/figures/graphs in Matlab? either in the options, or by executing a certain code like disable plot and enable plot to ensure that no figures are being displayed.
I know that I can just browse the code and comment the plotting part, but I don't want to forget to uncomment.
Try some combination of the two commands:
set(gcf,'Visible','off') % turns current figure "off"
set(0,'DefaultFigureVisible','off'); % all subsequent figures "off"
The second one, if you put it near the beginning of your program, might do the trick for you. Of course, it is still creating the plots, which might be undesirable for computation time and/or RAM issues.
This is a classic reason to avoid Matlab when one can. It fosters bad programming design. To solve this problem correctly, you should create something that lets you "flip a switch" at the highest level of your program and control whether plots show or do not show. Perhaps it even has gradations of the show/don't show option so you can select different types of plots that do/do not show depending on what diagnostics you are running.
Ideally, you'd want this "flip a switch" creation to be a class that has access to visibility and plot functions of other objects. But because interactive object-orientation is so cumbersome in Matlab, it's often not worth the effort to develop such a solution, and most people don't think about this design aspect from the outset of their project.
Matlab would encourage someone to solve this by making flag variables like "isPlotVisible" or something, and creating functions that always accept such flags. I agree this is a bad design.
You could run matlab from the command line with:
matlab -nojvm
but then you don't get the GUI at all. Alternatively, you could write a file 'plot.m':
function h = plot(varargin)
h = [];
end
which doesn't do anything. If this is in the working directory (or somewhere else near the top of the path), then plot will call your function instead of the 'real' plot. You'd need to do the same from any other graphing functions you call.
The closest way I know of 'turning off plotting' would be a folder of such functions that you can add to the path to disable plotting, and remove to enable.
The previous methods are fine, but an easy and good habit to take is to use a "on/off parameter". So basically, at the beginning of your code, you can add something like:
DisplayFigure = 1; %1 = display, 0 = no display
After that, add "if DisplayFigure == 1 ... end" for all your plotting related commands, where the commands should be inside the if statement (the ... above). Hence you won't even compute the plots, which will save you a lot of time and memory. You just have to change the value of the variable "DisplayFigure" to plot or not the figures.
Related
In a live script in matlab, I plot multiple figures, and I use this code to enumerate the figures:
FigureQuantity=1
plot(data_1)
title('Figure '+string(FigureQuantity))
Then on another code section I do it again
FigureQuantity=FigureQuantity+1
plot(data_n)
title('Figure '+string(FigureQuantity))
The problem is that if I run the last code section again, FigureQuantity gets updated and the enumeration of figures gets broken.
There is any way to get the number of tokens ordered by his code appearance on the live script? (independent of how many times the section code is run)
I would like to keep tokens so I can mix inserted images and plots. And I want to export the document as PDF (not to show plots in an application or an independent window).
What I need is something like MS Word enumeration of figures and tables.
I found this Matlab documentation: Number Section Headings, Table Titles, and Figure Captions Programmatically, but it appears to be used for creation of MS Word or HTML documents, and not to enumerate images on Matlab live scripts.
I do not understand how to use it, or if that is his purpose on Matlab.
I'm assuming you're updating the data_n variable live as well; otherwise, if you're defining these variables manually then not doing so for the figure variables isn't really the solution I think you're looking for.
Why not for-loop through the figure updates?
for FigureQuantity = 1:numberOfFigureQuantities
figure(FigureQuantity);
hold on;
plot(data_n(FigureQuantity))
title(strcat('Figure Number: ',num2str(FigureQuantity)));
end
The figure count corresponding to the FigureQuantity will index the appropriate figure and will update that figure if it already existed. This is the solution I think you're looking for; if not, please clarify.
I am using MATLAB's fitgmdist ("fit a guassian mixture to data", from the Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox) with some success. Is there a way to make it run in a verbose mode, e.g., tell me what iteration it is on, or show convergence stats during the process, so I know how well it is progressing?
Related, is there a way after the function has run and delivered the gmdistribution object, to determine how many iterations actually ran or how close the convergence came? (It would be useful to know these things so I could better set the options parameters up front.)
Simply put: no and yes.
You can try to access the actual .m-file (e.g. open(fitgmdist)) to copy it and then edit it to your purposes (copy it so you won't overwrite the build-in function), but there is no straight-forward implemented way to obtain the verbosity you want. The name-value pair which comes closest to what you want is display, iter:
iter: Display iterative output to the Command Window for some functions; otherwise display the final output.
I am not quite sure about this part, since I can't run a test, but the final number of iterations should be available in the gmdistribution structure under gmdistribution.NumIterations. The docs state that this is only for objects constructed with fitgmdist.
There is something very simple that can be very upsetting occasionally.
I sometimes want to keep track of the outputs of an algorithm at each iteration, so within a for loop, I use disp command of MATLAB to output some information. However, although there is quite a bit of time between the calling of dispcommands, the MATLAB command window falls behind and I need to use the mouse to keep up with it manually. Do you know if there is any way to have it not fall behind?
Thanks,
It really shouldn't fall behind, but I could see this happening if the computations are intensive and the MATLAB JVM, which drives the GUI, does get the resources to update the command window.
The following command may be of help:
drawnow update % or just drawnow
According to the documenatation page, this "causes only user-interface objects to refresh, if needed". If that fails, try just drawnow with no arguments to see if it helps to flush the entire system event queue, including graphics updates.
If that doesn't work you could insert a pause(0.01) or something similar as a last resort.
It shouldn't fall behind if you don't use the mouse at all. However, I often use the waitbar for this purpose.
FEX also has several text & GUI progress bars.
I'm running a large code so I would like to ensure everything is correct when it starts to run. One thing I do is to plot some data to see if they make sense. I had several such plots (figure (1), figure (2) ...) and all of them are buried in different 'if' sentences. But I found only some of them pop up during the code is running, the others just don't show up until the code finished running. I have checked all the if statements are true.
Since my code is a little large I can't put it here. Can someone tell me the possible reasons that affect when figures pop up (during the code is running or after it's finished)? Thanks a lot!
You can use the drawnow function to update your figures while code is still running. If you want your figure window to "pop up" at any given time, you may also need to explicitly call figure(figNum).
Note that while it can be fun to watch your figures update in real time, you may incur a severe performance penalty by doing so. If you have long-running loops, you might consider only showing every N-th update, where N is 10, 100, 1000, or some other appropriate value:
for iter = 1:1e6
plot(x,y);
if ~mod(f0,1000); drawnow; end
end
If you are just interested in plotting right at the beginning as a sanity check, you might run the first iteration of your code outside of a for loop, and run drawnow to make sure it plots. Then enter into the for loop starting at the second iteration. The advantage over testing iter==1 is that you don't have to waste cycles on a conditional at every iteration.
I often have function such as:
sin(a*w*t + p)
where:
w = natural frequency
t = time
a,p = parameters (which I can vary)
As you can see if you want to vary a,p, you can do so via the standard interface but it's not very convenient. So I thought I'd look for a GUI which has a slider for each parameter. Does such a thing exist?
I've never seen one so I thought I'd quickly write one. However, I'm worried that due to lack of time and knowledge of matlab I will cause problems such as generating too many plot commands when the slider is moved instead of just one. Of course I also have the problem that I want to specify a field where the user can specify the function e.g. by typing sin(a*w*t +p) in a text field and then specify what each variable means which I currently don't know how to do (it looks like a parsing task). Can I do this or should I go with a predefined set of functions?
You can find similar projects in Matlab File Exchange as example.
For instance:
Integral Tool
Function Parameter Slider
I didn't have a look at the code but according to the screenshots, it should help you.
Regarding the function input feature, you can use the function eval (with a few checks on the input if you need reliability). If you want to allow any parametric variable, it may be harder.