The default plot behaviour in Matlab is to overwrite axes and tick marks with the line to be plotted. For instance in the figure below near the origin the x-axis is overwritten and the tick-marker for 0.004 is also overwritten.
Is there a way to have the axes and tick marks have priority over the plotted line?
Change the axes Layer property to 'top'.
set(gca,'Layer','top');
I used the semiologx command to generate these two plots, but I need the plot to show more reference values on the X axis.
How can this be accomplished in MATLAB?
It seems your plot was generated by semilogx, not semilogy. Anyway you can set the values on the x axis (called "ticks") using (for example):
set(gca, 'xtick', [1 10 100 1000])
The 1st argument is the axis handle you wish to change, in this example I just use gca which stands for "get current axes", and returns the currently active axes.
Quick version
How can I control the x- and y-values for a 3-d bar plot in Matlab?
Details
Say we have an 10 x 20 data matrix and we plot it using bar3, and we want to set the x- and y-values. For instance:
foodat = rand(10,20);
xVals = [5:14];
yVals = [-3:16];
bar3(xVals, foodat);
xlabel('x'); ylabel('y');
Is there a way to feed it the yVals as well? Otherwise the y axes always defaults to [1:N].
Note I don't just want to change the labels using XTickLabel and YTickLabel. I need to change the actual values on the axes, because I am plotting multiple things in the same figure. It isn't enough to just change how the (wrong) axis ticks are labeled. So this is different from issues like this:
How can I adjust 3-D bar grouping and y-axis labeling in MATLAB?
Other things I have tried
When I try changing the xvals with:
set(gca,'XTick', xVals)
set(gca,'YTick', yVals)
The values are taken in, but actually show up on the wrong axes, so it seems x and y axes are switched using bar3. Plus, it is too late anyway as the bar graph was already plotted with the wrong x- and y-values, so we would end up giving ticks to empty values.
Note added
Matlab tech support just emailed me to let me know about the user contributed function scatterbar3, which does what I want, in a different way than the accepted answer:
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/1420-scatterbar3
I found a way of doing it. Ill give you a piece of code, then you'll need to "tidy up" , mainly the axis limits and the Xticks, as bar3 does set up the Xticks inside, so if you want others you'll need to set them manually yourself.
So the trick here is to get the Xdata from the bar3 handle. The thing here is that it seems that there is a handle for each row of the data, so you need to iterate for each of them. Here is the code with the current output:
foodat = rand(20,10);
xVals = [5:14];
yVals = [-3:16];
% The values of Y are OK if called like this.
subplot(121)
bar3(yVals, foodat);
subplot(122)
h=bar3(yVals, foodat);
Xdat=get(h,'XData');
axis tight
% Widdth of barplots is 0.8
for ii=1:length(Xdat)
Xdat{ii}=Xdat{ii}+(min(xVals(:))-1)*ones(size(Xdat{ii}));
set(h(ii),'XData',Xdat{ii});
end
axis([(min(xVals(:))-0.5) (max(xVals(:))+0.5) min(yVals(:))-0.5, max(yVals(:))+0.5])
Note: Y looks different but is not.
As you can see now the X values are the ones you wanted. If you'd want other size than 1 for the intervals between them you'd need to change the code, but you can guess how probably!
Hi I'm trying to implement as following code.
plot(bins,r);
plot(bins,g);
plot(bins,b);
But I want to plot in one figure.
Is there any way?
For multiple plots in the same figure and not the same axis. You have to use subplot(x,y,z). The first argument 'x' is the number of plot you want to produce, in your case 3. Second 'y' just adjusts the size of the plots, you can use 1. The third 'z' is the position of the plot, whether a certain plot comes first, second or third.
subplot(3,1,1)
plot(bins,r);
subplot(3,1,2)
plot(bins,g);
subplot(3,1,3)
plot(bins,g);
To distinguish between all three plot you can add another argument to plot() so that you can change colors. For example:
plot(bins,r,'r')
'r' will make the color of the plot red, 'b' makes it blue, 'k' makes it black...so on.
Yes, you can plot everything in one go:
plot(bins,r,bins,g,bins,b)
or use hold on after the first call to plot.
You need to use hold on
hold on retains plots in the current axes so that new plots added to
the axes do not delete existing plots. New plots use the next colors
and line styles based on the ColorOrder and LineStyleOrder properties
of the axes. MATLAB® adjusts axes limits, tick marks, and tick labels
to display the full range of data.
hold on
plot(bins,r)
plot(bins,g)
plot(bins,b)
I'm having a bit of a problem with what's happening to the axes of 9 plots that get subplotted together. I'm using subplot(3,3,x) to make a 3x3 grid of 9 plots, and custom labeling the ticks of the axes with
set(gca, 'XTickLabel', {'0,0','0,1','0,2','1,0','1,1','1,2','2,0','2,1','2,2'});
set(gca, 'YTickLabel', {'0,0','0,1','0,2','1,0','1,1','1,2','2,0','2,1','2,2'});
and the problem is that not all of the ticks specified show up on the subplots -- only about half of them, and they show up in the wrong places, at that.
I'm guessing this is matlab thinking that there isn't enough room to put all of the ticks and labels and showing a squeezed subset as a result, but it would look fine if it just did it. how do I make it all show up??
You can set the 'Xtick' & 'Ytick' property of the figure's axes. They define which ticks will be visible. In your case you want to show the first 9 xticks and the first 9 yticks - the following command will do it:
set(gca,'Xtick',1:9, 'Ytick',1:9)
In case you want to show every 2nd tick you would use:
set(gca,'Xtick',1:2:9,'Ytick',1:2:9)
Hope this helps.
You set custom tick labels with those commands, and they show up where the ticks are at that moment. You can see what the ticks are with
get(gca,'YTick');
For example:
plot(-2:2)
get(gca,'YTick');
returns [-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2]. If you now use
set(gca,'yticklabel',{'a','b','c','d','e'})
then those letters will appear at all ticks, starting from the first (-2) and since there are more ticks than ticklabels, the ticklabels will repeat, as you can see:
So these are ticks, but maybe you meant to just use labels, which I add with the following:
ylabel('this is the ylabel');
xlabel('and this the xlabel');
Play around with it and learn what's going, it's not that hard ;)
PS: with subplot, you can create different axes and set different ticks for each axes object separately. By default the axes are not linked or something, but completely independent! When you use gca, it returns the current axes, ie with subplot: the last one created or selected with subplot(3,3,x)!
So if you want to set ticks, labels are anything else on all the axes, you'll have to do it for all separately, ie:
subplot(3,3,1);
xlabel('x');
ylabel('y');
title('subplot (1,1)');
set(gca,'xticklabel',{'a','b','c'});
subplot(3,3,2);
xlabel('x');
ylabel('y');
title('subplot (1,2)');
subplot(3,3,1);
xlabel('x');
ylabel('y');
title('subplot (1,1)');
etc.
It's a matter of space. Matlab will show more ticks if you increase the size of the plot window, and viceversa. You can also reduce the font size in order to fit more ticks on the axes (try with set(gca,'FontSize',5) or any other font size value).