hline and vline

Draws 'low-impact' horizontal or vertical lines on the current axes

Description

These functions draw horizontal or vertical lines at specified places on the current axes. The axes are automatically held for the drawing of the lines, and restored to their previous 'hold' states afterwards. THe HandleVisibility of the new lines is "off" so that they don't appear on legends. (Incidentally, this also makes them invisible to moveplot.m and addplot.m) Objects with HandleVisibility set to off can be "found" by setting the root object's "ShowHiddenHandles" property to "on". Also, if an output argument is specified, the function will return the handle to the otherwise 'hidden' object.

Further arguments allow the user to set the linetype and color of the line (default is 'r:'), and to add labels. For example:

h = vline(42,'g','The Answer')

will return a handle to a vertical line at x=42 on the current axes, colored green, and with a text label "The Answer" on the axes close to the line, and in the same color of the line.

hline and vline both accept vector inputs.

• Acknowledgements: This submission has inspired the following:; data_marker, Advanced hline and vline, Demos from Image Processing Webinar 2006, MRI Brain Segmentation, Thresholding Tool, Manual Thresholding Tool, Improved 'vline'
• MATLAB release: MATLAB 6.0 (R12)
• Other requirements: Tested on Win 98 and 2K. Functionality is not dependent on Matlab R12.

[Larry Friese]

Very nice, but I get two extra data elements in the plot legend? Is there a way around that?

[H Z]

it's very handy and useful!!! Thanks:)

[confidential confidential]

fast and easy!

[Wolfgang Stiegmaier]

Excellent, easy to use, very effective, good work!

[Nahur Fonseca]

thanks for writing this.
It's amazing how matlab runtime library did not have such a function built-in.

[Stephen Sester]

This function meets the common need for drawing simple horz and vert lines on plots. Very nice addition to my tools; should be incorporated into future plot revision. Thank you for taking the time to share your work.

[Mike Jennings]

This is an excellent, easy to use tool to add a reference line in your plot figure. Can also be customized for color and linetypes. Good Job.

[Kedar Patel]

Thanks!

Handy lil' time saver.

[James Tedd]

very handy

[Min Poh]

test

[Krishna Pillai]

Nice handy function. Good job

[Dimitri Shvorob]

When I use VLINE, and later resize the axis with AXIS, vertical line's limits remain unadjusted.

[Andy N.]

Very Handy

[Chris H]

perfect for what i needed.

[carlo murgia]

 

[Felix Totir]

Should be Matlab standard functions.

[Simon B]

Great tool - one enhancement would be to allow for restricting the range of the lines.

[John D'Errico]

Very nice. My only (minor) comment would be it might be nice to control the location of the annotation text. I do agree that this is functionality that should have always been in matlab.

By the way, if anyone is worried, it works on a mac also. This is not system specific code.

[Josiah Haswell]

Awesome! At least sizeof(long) times better than doing it the standard way.

[Greg L]

Works great for linear axes. The location of the label is off if it has logrithmic axes.

[nimat r]

Thanks a lot.It's very nice.

[Ben Kang]

Very nice.

[B K]

Great tool, thanks for submitting!

[K R]

Thanks - this saves a lot of time and trouble!

[Storm Zhang]

This really saves me a lot of time. Matlab should put these two small programs into the standard library.

[Zafrir]

 

[Zafrir]

Good job!!! Very good

[Matteo]

 

[Kevin]

handy little tool

[Alejandro Arrizabalaga]

 

[Pete]

Quick, simple and effective. Excellent.

[John]

I could not find these two in the Matlab stand function list. They are handy and should be standard functions. Any one know the reason why NOT? Excellent job, Brandon!

[Marit]

 

[Akshay]

Very helpful and simple. Thanks!
I just made a minor change to the 'vline' function (to make the labels vertical):
Changed:
text(x+0.01*xrange,y(1)+0.1*(y(2)-y(1)),label,'color',get(h,'color'))
to:
text(x+0.02*xrange,y(1)+0.1*(y(2)-y(1)),label,...
'color',get(h,'color'),'Rotation',90)
and changed:
text(x-.05*xrange,y(1)+0.1*(y(2)-y(1)),label,'color',get(h,'color'))
to:
text(x-.01*xrange,y(1)+0.1*(y(2)-y(1)),label,...
'color',get(h,'color'),'Rotation',90)

[Matteo]

 

[Jimmy]

 

[Qiang]

 

[TAFKARS]

I meant to say...very helpful tool. Slight adjustment to code wrt linewidth etc to suit my personal taste/need, otherwise good job.

[Tongchao]

Great functions! Just what I need
It will be better if the location of text label can be arbitrarily specified.

[Abdullah]

Exactly what I wanted !