File Exchange Pick of the Week

November 7th, 2005

Get In Units

How many times have you written code that looks like this, just to find the position of a graphics object in something other than its current units?

hAxes = axes;
currentUnits = get(hAxes,'Units');
set(hAxes,'Units','Pixels');
axesPositionPixels = get(hAxes,'Position');
set(hAxes,'Units',currentUnits)

My code is littered with fragments like this. While it works, there are two things I don’t like about my code:

  1. 3 out of 4 lines have nothing to do with getting the information I want
  2. It’s not the least bit obvious what my code is doing

If I were smart, I would have figured out long ago that what I really wanted was a function that would return the property’s value in whatever units I specified. Fortunately, Jiro Doke recognized this coding pattern and developed a very convenient solution. getInUnits does exactly what its name says - it allows you to GET the value of any property that depends on Units or Font Units in whatever units you specify.

I also want to thank Jiro for his responsiveness. I emailed him with a very small suggestion after I came across this submission. He got right back to me, and posted an updated file almost immediately. Great stuff, Jiro!

By Scott Hirsch

09:01 UTC | Posted in Uncategorized | Permalink |

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Recent Comments

  • Zach: Hi Doug and Les, I didn’t have a lot of time to mess with this, but I did find a work-around. I plotted...
  • hamed: k
  • Les: @Zach This isn’t exactly what you are looking for but at least it puts all three parameters on the same...
  • Zach: Thanks for your suggestions Doug. I’ll give that a shot and see what happens. I’ve seen many of...
  • Doug: @Zach, I would say to use plotYYY, because that is close to what you want, but using depth as Y makes sense....
  • Doug: @Teja, I think this will work: http://www.mathworks .com/access/helpdesk /help/techdoc/ref...
  • Gify: merry christmas :) nice christmas tree! Regards, Janet Gify
  • Teja: Dear Doug Is there anyway to plot a surface from nonuniform data without meshgrid and griddata? Basically i...
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