It’s difficult to explain what is going on without seeing your graph or the exact commands you are using. If you are using a standard line plot, it’s possible that the zoomed in region has the same shape as the original plot. This happens a lot when you zoom in on a plot that does not have a lot of actual data points or does not vary much from point to point. One way to verify that your plot is zooming is when using the interactive tools to see the axes labels change. Depending on the range and label, it may not look like much is happening, also sometimes it can only be seen by the exponent multiplier at the edge of the axis.

I have a couple of questions…

I would like to be able to zoom in and out by a factor that is much larger than 2, but sometimes it does not work. How would I be able to do that?

I have tried to zoom in by adjusting the axis range/limits (e.g. by changing the max x-axis limit from 0.14 to 10e-9), or by dragging a box using the zoom-microscope (instead of the ‘hand’ tool). However, most of the time the result is only the area I’ve selected, at its original size! How can I blow up the small area I selected to be as large as the usual figure size? How come in some cases changing the axis range/limits does not seem to work?

Perplexed,

J

Check out Doug Hull’s excellent Zoom Box: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/loadFile.do?objectId=2884&objectType=FILE

-scott

I was trying to do zoom, then copy object, but zoom always affect all lines in the same plot. Maybe I should consider overlaying two plots in the same figure? Haven’t found anything about this yet.

You can link axes containing two images using the syntax
linkaxes(ax,’x')
where “ax” is a vector containing the handles to the two axes.

It’s not often that people talk about how the simulink scopes are more powerful than a regular figure window :-). Another option, although I am not sure if it is less work, would be to use the new toolbar editor to create icons for a toolbar in a MATLAB GUI to do the same things.

X Zoom
>>zoom xon

Y Zoom
>>zoom yon

Link X Axes
(I use this all the time, but unfortunately the syntax of the function requires the handles of all the subplots which may not be immediately known in order to link axes in the x or y direction. Therefore, I swiped some code out of the top of linkaxes and created a shortcut with the following code.)
>>fig = get(0,’CurrentFigure’);
>>if isempty(fig), return; end
>>ax = findobj(fig,’Type’,'Axes’);
>>nondatachild = logical([]);
>>for k=length(ax):-1:1
>>nondatachild(k) = isappdata(ax(k),’NonDataObject’);
>>end
>>ax(nondatachild) = [];
>>linkaxes(ax,’x')

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/loadFile.do?objectId=15029&objectType=file

-Dan