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LineSpec (Line Specification) - Line specification string syntax

GUI Alternative

To modify the style, width, and color of lines on a graph, use the Property Editor, one of the plotting tools . For details, see The Property Editor in the MATLAB Graphics documentation.

Description

This page describes how to specify the properties of lines used for plotting. MATLAB graphics give you control over these visual characteristics:

Line style
Line width
Color
Marker type
Marker size
Marker face and edge coloring (for filled markers)

You indicate the line styles, marker types, and colors you want to display using string specifiers, detailed in the following tables:

Line Style Specifiers

Specifier	Line Style
`-`	Solid line (default)
`--`	Dashed line
`:`	Dotted line
`-.`	Dash-dot line

Marker Specifiers

Specifier	Marker Type
`+`	Plus sign
`o`	Circle
`*`	Asterisk
`.`	Point (see note below)
`x`	Cross
`'square' or s`	Square
`'diamond' or d`	Diamond
`^`	Upward-pointing triangle
`v`	Downward-pointing triangle
`>`	Right-pointing triangle
`<`	Left-pointing triangle
`'pentagram' or p`	Five-pointed star (pentagram)
`'hexagram' or h`	Six-pointed star (hexagram)

Note The point (.) marker type does not change size when the specified value is less than 5.

Color Specifiers

Specifier	Color
`r`	Red
`g`	Green
`b`	Blue
`c`	Cyan
`m`	Magenta
`y`	Yellow
`k`	Black
`w`	White

All high-level plotting functions (except for the ez... family of function-plotting functions) accept a LineSpec argument that defines three components used to specify lines:

Line style
Marker symbol
Color

For example:

plot(x,y,'-.or')

plots y versus x using a dash-dot line (-.), places circular markers (o) at the data points, and colors both line and marker red (r). Specify the components (in any order) as a quoted string after the data arguments. Note that linespecs are single strings, not property-value pairs.

Plotting Data Points with No Line

If you specify a marker, but not a line style, only the markers are plotted. For example:

plot(x,y,'d')

Related Properties

When using the plot and plot3 functions, you can also specify other characteristics of lines using graphics properties:

LineWidth — Specifies the width (in points) of the line.
MarkerEdgeColor — Specifies the color of the marker or the edge color for filled markers (circle, square, diamond, pentagram, hexagram, and the four triangles).
MarkerFaceColor — Specifies the color of the face of filled markers.
MarkerSize — Specifies the size of the marker in points (must be greater than 0).

In addition, you can specify the LineStyle, Color, and Marker properties instead of using the symbol string. This is useful if you want to specify a color that is not in the list by using RGB values. See Line Properties for details on these properties and ColorSpec for more information on color.

Examples

Plot the sine function over three different ranges using different line styles, colors, and markers.

t = 0:pi/20:2*pi;
plot(t,sin(t),'-.r*')
hold on
plot(t,sin(t-pi/2),'--mo')
plot(t,sin(t-pi),':bs')
hold off

Create a plot illustrating how to set line properties:

plot(t,sin(2*t),'-mo',...
                'LineWidth',2,...
                'MarkerEdgeColor','k',...
                'MarkerFaceColor',[.49 1 .63],...
                'MarkerSize',12)