| Graphics and 3-D Visualization, MATLAB® Version 7.3 (R2006b) Release Notes | |
New features and changes introduced in this version are:
The three MATLAB® plotting tools (Figure Palette, Property Editor, and Plot Browser) now function as desktop components like the Workspace Browser and the Array Editor. They dock, however, not to the MATLAB desktop but to a Figures window. Figures windows contain one or more figures, each of which is accessible by a tab. Turning on any plotting tool changes your figure group into a mini-desktop. You can undock, rearrange, tab, and resize the plot tools within the mini-desktop, and their state will persist across MATLAB invocations. There are just one set of plot tools for all your figures, but they only operate on figures contained in the group; undocked figures are free of the plotting tools until you redock them.
For more information see Plotting Tools – Interactive Plotting in the MATLAB Graphics documentation.
The MATLAB Version 6 Property Editor, one of the Plotting Tools, is no longer available. this means that the 'v6' switch for the propedit function now produces an error instead of starting the version 6 property editor. The error message is
??? Error using ==> propedit The Version 6 property editor is no longer available. Sorry!
If you have code that calls the version 6 property editor, you will need to modify it to use the modular plotting tools described above in Plotting Tools Are Now Modular Desktop Components. The propedit function remain otherwise the same.
Printing MATLAB figures has become easier as a result of combining the Page Setup, Print Setup, and Print Preview dialogs into one tabbed Print Preview dialog. You can now specify paper size, plot size and layout, color and line weight, header text, rendering, and other printing characteristics in this new dialog. The Page Setup and Print Setup dialogs still exist, and the Print dialog that you call from File —> Print remains the same. The Page Setup dialog is available on all platforms.
For more information, see Using Print Preview in the MATLAB Graphics documentation and printpreview in the MATLAB function reference documentation.
The Page Setup dialog no longer is available from the figure window File menu. However, it does continue to exist; you can raise it using the pagesetupdlg command. The old Print Preview dialog has been removed, however. The old Print Setup dialog can be raised using the command
print -dsetup
When you dismiss the Print Setup dialog with OK, the settings you made with it are saved, but nothing is printed at that time.
If your mouse has a center scroll wheel, you can use it to zoom in and out of axes, as well as by clicking and/or dragging.
You can zoom in by positioning the mouse cursor where you want the center of the plot to be and either press the mouse button or rotate the mouse scroll wheel away from you (upward). Zoom out by positioning the mouse cursor where you want the center of the plot to be and either simultaneously press Shift and the mouse button, or rotate the mouse scroll wheel toward you (downward). Each mouse click or scroll wheel click zooms in or out by a factor of 2.
You can now easily customize the text of datatips. The datacursormode function lets you specify the contents and formatting of text displayed by the data cursor tool. When the data cursor tool is active, you can use its context (right-click) menu to edit or specify the text update function that MATLAB executes to display datatips. For more information, see Data Cursor — Displaying Data Values Interactively in the MATLAB Graphics documentation and datacursormode in the MATLAB Function Reference documentation.
You can now customize the behavior of data explore modes by modifying the zoom, pan and rotate3d objects that are dereferenced as follows:
h = pan(figure_handle) h = rotate3d(figure_handle) h = zoom(figure_handle)
These syntaxes create mode objects that you can use to control the behaviors of the explore tools. Among the effects you can achieve using these explore mode objects are
Allow, change, or inhibit a mode for a specified axes
Create callbacks for pre- and post-buttonDown events
Change callbacks dynamically
See pan, rotate3d, and zoom in the MATLAB Function Reference documentation for details and examples.
Using mode objects can cause a forward incompatibility. In prior releases, explore modes did not return an argument. Therefore, code such as the above examples that you write to take advantage of the new API will not run in MATLAB versions prior to R2006b. zoom, pan, and rotate3d code written for previous MATLAB versions, however, will run as before (there is no backward incompatibility).
A new section in the Graphics User Guide, Types of MATLAB® Plots, now includes a gallery of graphs that catalogs the kinds of plots that you can create using MATLAB graphics functions. There are two tables containing labeled icons, one for Two-Dimensional Plotting Functions, and one for Three-Dimensional Plotting Functions, classified by plot type. Clicking the function name above any thumbnail plot in the gallery opens the reference documentation for that function.
Reference pages for functions that create, edit, annotate, and save plots have been enhanced in several ways:
Thumbnail figures at the top of plotting functions and related GUI reference pages illustrate what you see when you invoke these functions.
GUI Alternatives sections above syntax descriptions describe how to invoke a function (or similar capability) from a GUI, and provide links to relevant topics in the Graphics and Desktop Tools User Guides.
Revised printing documentation in user guides and reference pages (see New Desktop Printing GUI, above)
Numerous corrections and clarifications of details in user guides and reference pages
| Programming, MATLAB Version 7.3 (R2006b) | Creating Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), MATLAB Version 7.3 (R2006b) | |
| © 1984-2008- The MathWorks, Inc. - Site Help - Patents - Trademarks - Privacy Policy - Preventing Piracy - RSS |