clickableLegend - Interactive highlighting of data in figures

A legend with clickable strings that let you hide and show objects in a plot.
7.8K Downloads
Updated 1 Sep 2016

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Editor's Note: This file was selected as MATLAB Central Pick of the Week

**** UPDATE ****
ClickableLegend now also highlights entries when you click them in the figure/axes window. This function is also R2014b ready
clickableLegend is a wrapper around the LEGEND function that provides the added functionality to turn on and off (hide or show) a graphics object (line or patch) by clicking on its text label in the legend. Its usage is the same as the LEGEND function in MATLAB.
Notes:

1. You can group multiple lines into a single legend entry and toggle their visibility with a single click.

2. The DisplayedLines parameter lets you specify which lines should be displayed initially. This is useful if you have a large number of lines but want to start out with only a few shown.

3. If you save the figure and re-load it, the toggling functionality is not automatically re-enabled. To restore it, simply call clickableLegend with no arguments.

4. To prevent the axis from automatically scaling every time a line is turned on and off, issue the command: axis manual

Example 1:
z = peaks(100);
plot(z(:,26:5:50))
grid on;
axis manual;
clickableLegend({'Line1','Line2','Line3','Line4','Line5'}, 'Location', 'NorthWest');

Example 2:
f = plot([1:10;1:2:20]','x'); hold on;
g = plot(0:.1:10,sin([0:.1:10;0:.2:20]'),'r-');
h = plot(11:20,rand(5,10)*5,'b:');
clickableLegend([f;g;h], {'Line1','Line2','Line3'},...
'groups', [1 1 2 2 3 3 3 3 3], 'displayedLines', [2 3]);

Cite As

Ameya Deoras (2024). clickableLegend - Interactive highlighting of data in figures (https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/21799-clickablelegend-interactive-highlighting-of-data-in-figures), MATLAB Central File Exchange. Retrieved .

MATLAB Release Compatibility
Created with R2008a
Compatible with any release
Platform Compatibility
Windows macOS Linux

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Version Published Release Notes
1.4.0.1

Updated license

1.4.0.0

ClickableLegend now also highlights entries when you click them in the figure/axes window. This function is also R2014b ready

1.2.0.0

Added ability to group lines into single legend entries and specify which lines are displayed initially.

1.0.0.0