Comments on: Adding annotations to graphs

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:06:37 +0000

Pat,

Without knowing the details of your issue, I would say go to copy options and try using the “match screen size” and “bitmap” options before copying.

If that does not help, and you have a license with software maintenance, you should contact technical support (with the same “request a feature” link on the right sidebar) or if not, ping the community on comp.soft-sys.matlab (MATLAB newsgroup link on the top navigation bar).

By: Pat

Pat — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:36:12 +0000

James,
I like using the annotation, but I often find that when I copy the plot and paste it into a document, the arrows and text have changed location and/or size in the pasted version. Sometime, I manually shift things around to get them to line up in the correct spot, but usually I give up on annotating them in Matlab and wait until I am in Word or PowerPoint to do the annotation. However, I would really like to be able to do the annotation in Matlab since it is much more intuitive.

How can I get around these resizing and repositioning problems?

By: Ken

Ken — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:49:27 +0000

Hi Tim,

I agree…that sounds like a useful feature. I’ve forwarded your request on to the appropriate team.

Thanks for the great feedback,
-Ken

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:02:58 +0000

I think what Hao is requesting is something just like the ‘TooltipString’ property on uicontrols and the built in tool tips that pop-up when you mouse over the figure toolbar buttons. I’d like to second that request. Is it possible to add a ‘TooltipString’ property to graphics objects such as lines, patches, surfaces, etc.? And maybe even a ‘MouseHoverFcn’ property that defines a function to call when the mouse is hovered over the object. This is just like the existing ButtonDownFcn property but wouldn’t require a mouse click. (The MouseHoverFcn would just allow more end user customization over a simple tooltip display.)

By: Ken

Ken — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:07:56 +0000

Hi Hao,

I see what your driving at (I think) - you want to be able to toggle the annotations when you click them (or maybe have them popup when you mouse over them).

I’ll forward along your request!

-Ken

By: hao

hao — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:35:42 +0000

Yes, a “tooltip” for data will be nice.

I see a way of customizing data cursor text.
http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/index.html?/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/ref/datacursormode.html&http://www.google.com/search?q=data+cursor+matlab&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS240US240

but it seems too cumbersome for attaching short descriptions to scatter points in a plot.

Ideally,

>> pts = [0.1 0.2; 0.3 0.4; 0.1 0.3];
>> desc = {’case abc’; ‘case xyz’; ‘case def’};
>> h = plot(pts(:,1), pts(:,2), ‘o’);
>> datatooltip (h, desc)

and you move a mouse over the data point (or click on it) to see the “desc” string. How’s that?

By: Ken

Ken — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:48:20 +0000

Hi Hao,

You can currently click a point within a figure and see a tool-tip style window containing the selected point. Select the “Data Cursor” tool in the figure window, and subsequently click a point within your figure.

-Ken

By: hao

hao — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:21:49 +0000

It will be extremely handy to have a “mouse-over data tip”. Often, it’s too much clutter to display text annotations for each point in a matlab plot. Instead, it would be nice to simply mouse over (or click) on a data point to see its text annotation. What do you think?