{"id":2942,"date":"2011-11-23T22:09:51","date_gmt":"2011-11-23T22:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/2011\/11\/23\/scrolling-figures-guis\/"},"modified":"2011-11-23T22:09:51","modified_gmt":"2011-11-23T22:09:51","slug":"scrolling-figures-guis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/2011\/11\/23\/scrolling-figures-guis\/","title":{"rendered":"Scrolling Figures & GUIs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ameya<\/a>'s pick this week is Scrollsubplot<\/a> by Bjorn Gustavsson<\/a>.\r\n <\/p>\r\n

This week, it's an early post because of Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S.<\/i><\/p>\r\n

Hello MATLAB fans! My name is Ameya and I'm a colleague of Jiro and Brett at MathWorks. I primarily support MATLAB users in\r\n financial services but I'm personally very interested in tool building, visualization and GUIs. This is my first pick as a\r\n guest on this blog so I hope you enjoy it.<\/i><\/p>\r\n

If you are familiar with any of my submissions, you might know that I'm a big fan of generalizing built-in MATLAB functions\r\n with wrappers to offer more control or expanded functionality. My pick this week does exactly that. It extends the subplot<\/tt><\/a> command to create an infinite canvas of plots with a scroll bar. This can be very useful if you have many visualizations\r\n to display in a single figure window or GUI but a limited amount of screen real estate. Best of all, because it works just\r\n like subplot<\/tt>, you don't need to learn new syntax or modify a lot of existing code. Reviewer Telmo Amaral perhaps says it best: \"This function\r\n did precisely what I needed in the easiest possible way: just had to replace all the calls to subplot with calls to scrollsubplot.\"\r\n <\/p>\r\n

For example, suppose we need to display 3 rows of plots on a figure but really only have enough room for 2 rows on screen\r\n at one time. We can set up just such a canvas with scrollsubplot<\/tt>:\r\n <\/p>

% Create a standard 2-row view, similar to _subplot_<\/span>\r\nscrollsubplot(2,1,1); plot(cumsum(randn(200,10)));\r\nscrollsubplot(2,2,3); plot(rand(10,1), rand(10,1), '^'<\/span>);\r\nscrollsubplot(2,2,4); hist(randn(100,1));\r\n\r\n% Create axes outside the visible area and generate a scroll bar to bring<\/span>\r\n% these axes into view<\/span>\r\nscrollsubplot(2,2,5); imagesc(magic(16));\r\nscrollsubplot(2,2,6); pie(rand(10,1));<\/pre> 
The figure can be scrolled interactively or with the supporting scroll<\/tt> function. The final result looks something like the following:\r\n   <\/p>\r\n   
 <\/p>\r\n   
Bjorn adds the convenience of using the arrow and the page up\/down keys to scroll through the canvas of axes. I also like\r\n      how he sets up all of the position offset constants at the beginning of his function so that one can easily customize the\r\n      spacing between subplots.\r\n   <\/p>\r\n   
Comment<\/b><\/p>\r\n   
Let us know what you think here<\/a> or leave a comment<\/a> for Bjorn.\r\n   <\/p>