File Exchange Pick of the Week

February 6th, 2009

PlotAxisAtOrigin

Bob's pick this week is PlotAxisAtOrigin by Shanrong Zhang.

As an application engineer I showed MATLAB to a lot of people. Occasionally when I presented graphics capabilities someone would ask how to make plots where the X and Y axes lines go through the origin. You know: the way we learned to draw them in school. By default MATLAB puts the X axes on bottom and the Y axes on the left. 

x = -2*pi:pi/10:2*pi;
y = sin(x);
plot(x,y)

While the xAxisLocation can be set to top, and the yAxisLocation can be right, neither has an origin option for example. So, instead, I usually suggested drawing lines through the origin. In fact, prior "Pick of the Week" star Brandon Kuczenski made that trivial with hline and vline. 

hline(0)
vline(0)

Not satisfied? Neither was Shanrong. Hence, PlotAxisAtOrigin. 

PlotAxisAtOrigin(x,y)

Comments?


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Published with MATLAB® 7.8

By Robert Bemis

06:00 UTC | Posted in Picks | Permalink |

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4 Responses to “PlotAxisAtOrigin”

  1. Markus replied on February 9th, 2009 at 19:35 UTC :

    Sorry, but I think this package is not very useful. On the first view it looks nice, but the axis will not change when zooming in etc.

    Markus

  2. Bob replied on February 10th, 2009 at 13:35 UTC :

    Markus, I agree that the ability to zoom/pan the plot and have its axes ticks adjust automatically would be a nice enhancement. I see more and more submissions where users collaborate to improve and build upon each others’ work. This example seems like a good opportunity to continue that trend. Any takers? :)

  3. matt fig replied on February 16th, 2009 at 20:23 UTC :

    I posted a file which allows more functionality, though it still has limitations.

    http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/22956

  4. Bob replied on February 19th, 2009 at 13:49 UTC :

    Matt, that is an interesting solution. The pan behavior was particularly fun. Thank you very much for the contribution. I added your submission to my watch list. :)

    Solving this problem clearly involves a lot of thinking and deciding about what behaviors to support and how to implement those features. MATLAB users tend to have very different preferences. Meeting everyone’s requirements may not be possible. That may explain why AXES objects currently follow a simple model.

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