To check if you’re running MATLAB with Sun rendering, type the following in the command window:

java.lang.System.getProperty('apple.awt.graphics.UseQuartz')

If the UseQuartz property returns false, you will need to create a java.opts file inside the MATLAB bin/maci (or maci64 if you’re using a 64-bit version) folder, and give it this assignment:

-Dapple.awt.graphics.UseQuartz=true

If you are using MATLAB R2008a or later, this file is already present with this assignment in it.

MATLAB does have the equivalent of the OnZoom callback. It’s a zoom property called ActionPostCallback. Check out the help for ZOOM for explanations and examples.

Regardless, we are aware of the issues with datetick and rotated tick labels, and are very interested in addressing these in a future release.
- scott

I have performed something similar to the kludge mentioned by Dan K before, but as mentioned by lehalle, you get very strange behaviour when zooming.

Imagine the case when you have set your own XTickLabels, the the silly user zooms on a region.. what happens? The same labels are reused!! A complete disaster.

Now what WOULD be useful (and may exist but I cannot for the life of me find it) would be a OnZoom callback. I can imagine lots of cool things that can be performed with this, particularly in a GUI aspect. And then the horrible lable kludge can be hidden in a nice compact reuseable piece of code and will actually work over all zoom ranges.

(by the way – to get around the problem previously I have created a Timer of interval 0.1 second that continuously polls the axis and axis tic locations, and if they have changed, update the plots… nowhere near as nice)

(sorry for the long post)

- Rod

%% Example
figure
plot(today-100:today,cumsum(randn(101,1)))
datetick
ax=axis;axis([today-10 today ax(3:4)])
title(‘Where have my other ticks gone?’)

You know where the text is roughly in one dimension for each axis (e.g., you know the centered horizontal locations from the Xtick values). But there is not a simple way to inquire about the exact position. There is no doubt that this is currently awkward to achieve.

–loren

the workaround you suggest requires that I know where to put the text; is there a simple way to obtain this information about existing labels? Or have I misunderstood your suggestion?

-Steve

This request is on the enhancement list. I don’t get into discussions here about timing typically.

The workaround for now is to replace the ticklabels with text. text can use the TeX interpreter and get the symbols such as pi into the label.

–Loren

x=linspace(-pi,pi);y=sin(x);
plot(x,y)
set(gca,’XTick’,(-pi:pi/2:pi))
set(gca,’XTickLabel’,{‘-\pi’,'-\pi/2′,’0′,’\pi/2′,’\pi’})

This means that I can not use ML alone to produce publication-quality figures with symbolic tick labels. Surely this has been on the ‘to-do’ list for a long time? Why is it not yet possible?