CMAPLINE

apply a colormap to lines in a plot

Description

CMAPLINE finds all lines in an axis and specifies their colors according to a colormap. Also accepts custom colormaps in the form of a n x 3 matrix.

EXAMPLE (generates screenshot)

%generate some data
x=(0:0.1:2*pi);
m=50; exdata=bsxfun(@plus,repmat(25.*sin(x),...
[m 1]),[1:m]');

figure
subplot(121);
plot(x,exdata,'o-','linewidth',2)
cmapline('colormap','jet');
set(gca,'color','k')
title('jet colormap')
 
subplot(122);
plot(x,exdata,'o-','linewidth',2)
custommap=flipud(hot);
cmapline('colormap',custommap,'filled')
set(gca,'color','k')
title('reverse hot colormap, filled markers')

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the following in the creation of this submission:
varycolor
This submission has inspired the following:
COLORMAP and COLORBAR utilities (Sep 2009)

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.6 (R2008a)

[Carlos Adrian Vargas Aguilera]

I think this was the idea of VARYCOLOR, but it missed it. Andrew, it would be nice to have the handle lines as an optional input. An a question: Why gcf is an specified axes handle? An idea could be:
>> CMAPLINE
>> CMAPLINE(COLORMAP) % string or hfunction or Mx3
>> CMAPLINE(AH,...) % single axes handle or
>> CMAPLINE(LH,...) % line handles (1 or more)

Well done, Carlos

[Andrew Stevens]

Carlos, thanks for your comments. I recently updated the file to incorporate your suggestions (though my handling of input arguements is still a bit crude).

[Ryan Ollos]

@ Carlos: "I think this was the idea of VARYCOLOR, but it missed it."

I don't see this as being the case. The purpose of VARYCOLOR is to create a colormap with maximum color variation. The purpose of this function seems to be applying a colormap to lines in an axes. They seem to have completely different purposes.

[Wolfgang Schwanghart]

If used with the 'lines' option, cmaplines returns an error if the linehandles are supplied as row vector. This can be avoided by changing line 152

cellfun(@(x,y)(set(x,'color',y)),lh(:),colrs);