{"id":447,"date":"2011-03-07T18:49:15","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T18:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/desktop\/2011\/03\/07\/back-to-basics-figure-toolbar\/"},"modified":"2011-03-07T18:49:15","modified_gmt":"2011-03-07T18:49:15","slug":"back-to-basics-figure-toolbar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/2011\/03\/07\/back-to-basics-figure-toolbar\/","title":{"rendered":"Back To Basics: Figure Toolbar"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week I’d like to visit an ubiquitous and yet overlooked topic: the toolbar in the figure window. If you consider yourself an advanced user, feel free to stick around; maybe you’ll see something new. <\/p>\n

The figure toolbar came up as the topic of a recent conversation with a colleague. He did not realize that the “Zoom In” button has different behaviors depending on the plot type. For a regular 2D plot, it zooms in by effectively changing the axes limits, but for a 3D plot, it keeps the limits the same and changes the size of the axes on screen. As the discussion progressed, I realized that in all the years he’s been using MATLAB, he hadn’t really given a ton of thought to the tools of the Figure window. He spends the time to get his data imported and set up just right, but usually accepts a plot as-is or decorates it manually using command-line functions. This is fine most of the time, but I find a little mouse-work saves me a ton of time when it comes to data exploration. <\/p>\n

Here is the Figure toolbar, stolen straight from our documentation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

The most basic functions: Zoom In, Zoom Out, Pan and Rotate 3D allow you to rearrange and navigate the plot to focus on a particular section of data. These are also useful for exploring a data set to see the data in a particular region, such as where two plots intersect or the location of some minimum or maximum. <\/p>\n

The next three buttons deal with the actual data values in the plot. Data cursor provides a tooltip showing the values of the data at point you select with the mouse. Data brushing allows you to to modify or highlight a selection of points and data. I described this feature<\/a> back when it was introduced. Data link keeps the plot automatically in-sync with variables in the workspace. I also wrote about this<\/a> back in 2008.<\/p>\n

Insert Color Bar and Insert Legend are about adding informational elements to the figure window. I usually see these called via the functions legend<\/tt> and colorbar<\/tt>. But, it’s sometimes nice to use them interactively when you just want to turn one on temporarily. <\/p>\n

The final set of buttons toggles Plot Tools, which is an interactive plot editor where you can add\/delete whole elements and change properties like color and line type of a particular dataset. It’s worthy of its own post, so I’ll talk about that in future if you’re interested.<\/p>\n

All of the previous tools show up in the default figure toolbar, but there are actually a lot more tools you can turn on to edit and explore plots. There is a camera toolbar that gives finer control around rotating and sizing a 3D plot. <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

There’s also a Plot Edit Toolbar that lets you add text and shapes to a figure. I find this quite useful, as it is much easier to position and size annotations with a mouse than by programmaticaly setting their coordinates. <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Both the Plot Edit and Camera toolbars are not shown by default. To get them go to the View menu in the figure window and select one or both. <\/p>\n

Are there any plot editing commands you wish were on the toolbar? Do you prefer using the command-line tools like line<\/tt>, text<\/tt>, legend<\/tt>, rotate<\/tt>, etc or do you prefer the interactive tools?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week I’d like to visit an ubiquitous and yet overlooked topic: the toolbar in the figure window. If you consider yourself an advanced user, feel free to stick around; maybe you’ll… read more >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12,97],"tags":[87,101,64,98,99,100],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}