arrow.m

Draw a line with an arrowhead.

Description

ARROW (5/20/2009) Draw a line with an arrowhead.

ARROW(Start,Stop) draws a line with an arrow from Start to Stop (points should be vectors of length 2 or 3, or matrices with 2 or 3 columns), and returns the graphics handle of the arrow(s). By itself, ARROW will use the mouse to allow selection.

ARROW DEMO & ARROW DEMO2 show 3-D & 2-D demos of the capabilities of ARROW.

ARROW PROPERTIES shows the properties that can be set (length, base angle, tip angle, width, which ends have arrowheads, etc.)

• Acknowledgements: This submission has inspired the following:; Random Boolean Network Toolbox, arrowflow, quiver2.m v1.2 (Nov 2009)
• MATLAB release: MATLAB 6.5 (R13)

[a c]

greatest function ever!

[Aslak Grinsted]

 

[Niclas Borlin]

Great!

[M Bakht]

It is just great. Amazing.

[Jakob van de Laar]

Great package, it should be incorporated in
the standard Matlab distribution

[Benedikt Halldorsson]

Neat package, but (unless I'm missing something obvious) renders itself essentially USELESS.
Try setting the linestyle of the arrow line to dotted (set(h,'linestyle',':') and then try printing it out to a file (print -depsc test.eps) and view the postscript image. The line certainly is not dotted (on Matlab 6.5). Same problem with dashed and dot-dashed lines.
I'm not sure if this is an arrow.m problem, or Matlab's.

[Bernhard Boeck]

That's exactly what I'm looking for

[Arnd-Ragnar Rhiemeier]

Excellent package. Help topics very comprehensive. Easy to use. Quickly leads to appealing graphical output. This package is exactly what I was looking for.

[ke wang]

Very Useful and convenient. Easy to use!!

[Gerald Dalley]

Very nice

[Kelvin Rocha]

Very useful. Explanations are excellent. Exactly what I was looking for.

[Mattias Forsblom]

Excellent.

[Eddie Fiorelli]

Excellent work, thorough documentation. Thanks!

[Olivier Marsden]

Very useful!

[Nathaniel de Lautour]

Superb effort. Highly configurable, easy to use and well documented to boot.

[Rattikan Saelim]

 

[Evan Westwood]

Couldn't figure out how to make the arrow line and arrow head have a specific color. Arrowheads didn't look as nice as those you might plot in drawing/presentation packages such as Powerpoint.

[Ian Mackenzie]

 

[Janik Zikovsky]

Very good, better than annotation('arrow') because it is in axis units!

[Dave Cogdell]

This code (specifincally including the documentation (which is at the same time incomplete and inadequate) is far too complex for the simple thing(s) it does. I believe the author is an engineer: he should refrain from trying to write like a computer scientist and write like an engineer.

[Changshun Deng]

Good script!

[Amit Kesar]

Very good. Thank you.

[Sharoni Shafir]

Works great, thanks!

[Vijaykumar Sathyamurthi]

Thanks for this excellent tool. I hope you continue writing such winderful codes!!!

[Shane Lin]

I add the following comment at the file head. arrow(Start,Stop,'EdgeColor','b','FaceColor','b') color arrow.

[super tanne]

 

[Very satisfied]

Exactly what I needed. Perfect!

[Jasper Menger]

Nicely done. A shame by the way Matlab doesn't seem to have a builtin function for drawing arrows from the command line.

[JR P]

This is great. I hate how MATLAB uses normalized figure coordinates in their annotation() call for drawing arrows. It makes no sense and someone at MathWorks got lazy, so it becomes nearly useless. This code is exactly what they should have done.. good job Erik!

[heath kitson]

thanks eric

[Nithya C.R.]

The program is really great with all the aspects of plotting a directed line excellently covered.

[J Xu]

this program is really good, easy-use. 3x Erik.

[Arun Karthi Subramaniyan]

Great tool. Very easy to use with detailed documentation. Thanks for sharing it with us.

[Vassili Pastushenko]

Good job. A small remark:

arrow([0 0],[1 1],50,10,30)

does not point to (0,1).

Probably it would be reasonable to add a feature of automatical swapping baseAngle and tipAngle, if baseAngle < tipAngle.
 

[Vassili Pastushenko]

does not point to (1,1)

[Ramesh Rajasekaran]

 

[jonny e]

Excellent and easy to use. I'd emphasize that one should call axis(axis) prior to plotting the arrow, or the axis limits will get reset which will render the arrow incorrectly. This is noted in the help, but tucked towards the bottom.

[B Gurt]

Does exactly what it needs to do.

[Jorge Marin]

 

[Dustin Kruse]

works perfectly

[Rutty Bee]

Ruins the figure when plotting 3-D arrows with z-components. In this case, the width of the arrowhead becomes so large that the plot is rendered unusable. This is the case no matter how one tries to set its size.

[Ahmet Sacan]

Does not work when called in a deployed application (i.e., when called from the executable generated using mcc).

[Tuan Hoang]

sorry, how to add this graphic handle (return value) to an existing axes, figure.

[Matthijs Klomp]

Works great.

[Alex Fard]

 

[Xuzhang Shen]

good

[GDR! x]

One can change the colour of an arrow by specifying 'FaceColor' and 'EdgeColor' properties, which is, unfortunately, not documented.

[Dmitry Vasilyev]

OMG! Just exactly what I was looking for! Excellent job, thank you Eric!

[Joselito Dimayuga]

the purpose of this Dir or format is for ?????

[lili kalmer]

 

[Leonardo Duarte]

 

[Saeed Taherion]

 

[Ke]

very useful.

[Hiram]

to set the color of the arrow, see this example:
axis([0 3 0 3 0 3]);
grid on
h=arrow([3 3 3],[0 0 0],36,'BaseAngle',60);
set(h, 'FaceColor', 'b');
set(h, 'EdgeColor', 'r');
Awesome application!

[Jianbo]

Excellent. One little problem is that the arrow created is a little different from the one inserted manually through the "insert" menu. For example, the position can not be adjust by mouse.

[Gabriel Akira Schreiber]

The arrowheads look distorted. Even the arrowheads in the demo look distorted.

[never change]

amazing,very useful

[Lorenzo Guerrasio]

It looks really great...I'll start use instead of quiver!

[Aamir]

 

[Aamir]

 

[Rob Campbell]

Useful in many ways but the code is very complicated and it's not clear how to attain specific effects without trawling through the function body. Why not put demo code in a separate file?

[Ryan Molecke]

I found this implementation to be slow and lacking. Admittedly I was drawing thousands of arrows at extremely short lengths. Here is an inline function I wrote in about 5 minutes to draw simple arrows.

function out = draw_arrow(startpoint,endpoint,headsize)
%by Ryan Molecke

   v1 = headsize*(startpoint-endpoint)/2.5;

   theta = 22.5*pi/180;
   theta1 = -1*22.5*pi/180;
   rotMatrix = [cos(theta) -sin(theta) ; sin(theta) cos(theta)];
   rotMatrix1 = [cos(theta1) -sin(theta1) ; sin(theta1) cos(theta1)];
   
   v2 = v1*rotMatrix;
   v3 = v1*rotMatrix1;
   x1 = endpoint;
   x2 = x1 + v2;
   x3 = x1 + v3;
hold on;
    % below line fills the arrowhead (black)
   fill([x1(1) x2(1) x3(1)],[x1(2) x2(2) x3(2)],[0 0 0]);
   % below line draws line (black)
   plot([startpoint(1) endpoint(1)],[startpoint(2) endpoint(2)],'linewidth',2,'color',[0 0 0]);

[Christopher]

This code, at least on R2009a, looks very strange.
close all; clc;
figure(1)
arrow([0;0;0],[1;0;0])
arrow([0;0;0],[0;1;0])
arrow([0;0;0],[0;0;1])
axis([-1 1 -1 1 -1 1])

I'm really having trouble with 3-D plots and arrows pointing along the 3rd axis.

[David]

THANK YOU!!!!

[Notan]

Works great, but the Arrowtips do not look perfect by default as they are the connection of two line ends and therefore not round in pdf printouts.
You can workaround this issue by drawing the arrow in the opposite direction and use parameter: 'End','start'.
But nonetheless it would be nice if they would be perfect by default ;-)

[Jiangmin zhang]

perfect!

[ben harper]

can you please include the color options that you write on these comments to the code help lines
thank you

[hajime yamada]

Could anybody please let me know the following:

1. How to change the size of the arrow?
2. Please let me know how to change the type of the arrow head.
3. If possible, please let me know how to have arrow at both the head and tail of the vector.
4. Instead of arrow, please let me know how I can have a dot at both ends of the vector?
5. How to change the line type?

Thanks.

[CC]

Overall, the script is very useful. However, when using this arrow script, the legend is messed up. Some of the legend symbols would show as "black" squares instead of the correct symbol. When the arrow script is not used, the legend is displayed correctly.

[Rishabh Kasliwal]

thanks a lot. I was trying to make a arrow in a gui window. was having difficulty in correctly saving the arrow location. using your code it works perfectly :)

[guizhi]

can this function specify the 'LineStyle', such as '-' , '--' , '-.' , and ':'?
how to do?
thank you.

[Arthur]

Very nice, thanks

[Miguel Gil-Pugliese]

Thanks :)

[Richard Crozier]

Really useful, thanks!

[Zhibo]

Very nice utility function. I just wonder if it is possible to fix the arrow head size so that it does not change with axis- zoom or resize. Thanks!

[Marco idiart]

Perfect. Just what I was needing.

[Dmytro Lituiev]

 

[William Mische]

This is great, I messed around with the annotations for 1.5 hours before finding this. Once I found it everything was working the way I wanted it to in a couple of minutes. Great Work!

[Will]

Using arrow with this script yields an unusually long arrow in the z direction, which is quite annoying. I wish the z arrow didn't become long.

clc; clear; close all

xvector=[1 0 0];
yvector=[0 1 0];
zvector=[0 0 1];

figure
grid on
daspect([1 1 1])
xlabel('x [mm]', 'FontWeight', 'bold')
ylabel('y [mm]', 'FontWeight', 'bold')
zlabel('z [mm]', 'FontWeight', 'bold')
arrow([0 0 0],xvector, 'EdgeColor','k','FaceColor','k')
arrow([0 0 0],yvector, 'EdgeColor','b','FaceColor','b')
arrow([0 0 0],zvector, 'EdgeColor','r','FaceColor','r')
view([1 1 1])

Help would be greatly appreciated.

[Jacopo]

> Christopher This code, at least on >R2009a, looks very strange.
>close all; clc;
>figure(1)
>arrow([0;0;0],[1;0;0])
>arrow([0;0;0],[0;1;0])
>arrow([0;0;0],[0;0;1])
>axis([-1 1 -1 1 -1 1])
>I'm really having trouble with 3-D plots >and arrows pointing along the 3rd axis.

I got the same problem on Matlab R2010a (7.10.0)

[Kuifeng]

 

[John Colby]

Wonderful. Thank you, Erik!!!