magnify

Turns the mouse into a pop-up magnifying glass to look at details of 2D plots.

Description

Ever wish MATLAB had a magnifying glass so you could look at the details of a small region of your plots without having to zoom in and out again and again? Just run 'magnify.m' with the figure of interest as the current figure, then use the left mouse button to bring up a magnified veiw that you control. Or use the 'Ctrl' key while clicking to bring up a magnifying glass that 'locks' onto the figure when released (for use when copying and printing figures). Use the '<' and '>' keys to make the magnifying glass smaller or larger. Use '-' and '+' to decrease or increase the magnification level.

• Acknowledgements: This submission has inspired the following:; magnifyrecttofig, shiftline, On-figure magnifier
• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.0.1 (R14SP1)

[Alex Podgaetsky]

Excellent!!!

[Fahad Al Mahmood]

Wonderful Function Indeed! Congratulations!

[James Goodwin]

very very good!

[Kang Dong-il]

You made what I REALLY needed.. thank you

[Tsakani Lotten]

Brilliant!

[Christina Hebert]

Very cool

[Vicky Svidenko]

Wow! Excellent!

[John D'Errico]

On a scale of 1 to 5, I'll put this at 6.

[Marcelø Zeri]

Very good!

[Jiro Doke]

Very nice! One comment:

If you could put a check before you set the LINEWIDTH, in case there are objects that doesn't have that property (e.g. image, lighting, etc). I can use this to magnify image files.

[Brett Shoelson]

I echo Jiro's suggestion, as well as the group consensus that this is a very nice function!

[Shanrong Zhang]

Great job! MATLAB should add it as a standard icon in their figure panel...

One small comment: if you could add one sentence "figure(f1);" after the first sentence "if (nargin == 0), f1 = gcf; end;", it should be more convenient. By doing this, the figure that is selected by user or the current one would automatically pop up to be "magnified".

Thanks for sharing !!!

[Lee Jay Fingersh]

Very nice app, thank you! I modified the controls slightly. Now, the arrow keys control magnification in each axis separately while the brackets control both together and the +/- keys control window size.

[Daphne W]

This is an excellent tool! Thanks!
For those who needed it to work with images just comment out the line with LineWidth:
% set(get(a2,'Children'),...
% 'LineWidth', 2);
That solves the problem.

What I am trying to figure out now, is how to make it work inside a gui with several axes. Seems to put the magnified image at the edge of the gui for some reason. Any ideas?

[Meche Nova]

I've solved this problem by setting up Units to "normalized". Works fine with several axes within one gui. Question:
how to delete a leftover window if you
occasionally hit the right mouse button?

[Gadget Gadget]

 

[Yvgeny Shvarzman]

If anybody can tell me if I can use this code too magnify other programs (for examle power point details) ?
Thanks

[Gordon Dix]

Very useful code. Great work!

[Dinesh Appya]

Excellent

[Hyway Yin]

Very nice!

[Sami Murad]

good it is really helpfull

[Jim Fallon]

Excellent instruction for handling mouse button motion and using 'UserData' in a GUI. Beside learning, it saved hours for development of my own GUI.

Thanks.
J. Fallon

[Husam Aldahiyat]

Superb, etc.

[Martin]

This looks extremely useful, anyone seen any problems with it on later versions of MATLAB R2007a? The zoom area is not located over the plot so cannot be seen...

[Dharma]

This is really awesome.
I am not sure if I am doing it wrong, ctrl+click makes the box stay on fig., how can I remove it if wanted to plot another figure on same axes.

[Lissa]

 

[Lissa]

 

[Akshay]

Neat!! Thanks a lot!

[mohamed Elmorsy]

Excellent,Wonderful Function

[Todd Welti]

I also like it, BUT doesn't seem to work well when the x axis is log based. This is pretty much all I use (frequency is normally plotted this way). I looked at the code but not sure how long it would take me to make that mod.....

[qooroo]

great app, but it deletes one set of data when I use it to look at plotyy graphs. a point for consideration?

-qooroo

[Bahram]

Excellent job. I guess it needs another revision to take care of some of the bugs that reveal themselves in the newer version of Matlab.

I use this function with imshow() and it gives me an error that:

There is no 'LineWidth' property in the 'image' class.
Error in ==> magnify>ButtonDownCallback at 39
   set(get(a2,'Children'), ...

Of course I could easily solve it by removing that line of code. Also the Ctrl key seems to leave the box on the image. Another thing that one might want to change is to set the XTick and YTick of the second axis to [ ]:

set(a2, 'XTick', [ ], 'YTick', [ ]);

Again, excellent job!

[Ted Teng]

 

[Evgeny Pr]

Very good function! But there is a slight problem. By operation with the image in function there is an error:

>> imshow(im, []);
>> magnify;
??? Error using ==> set
There is no 'LineWidth' property in the 'image' class.

Error in ==> magnify>ButtonDownCallback at 39
   set(get(a2,'Children'), ...

Thus after an error function continues to work normally at mouse moving.
I think, it is necessary to check that the object on axes is the image and to eliminate in that case change of properties of a line.

[Evgeny Pr]

I made the following changes to work properly:

 in ==> magnify>ButtonDownCallback at 39
- set(get(a2,'Children'), ...
- 'LineWidth', 2);

+ line_obj = findobj(a2, 'Type', 'line');
+ if ~isempty(line_obj)
+ set(line_obj, 'LineWidth', 2);
+ end