allowaxestogrow

With one click, zoom axes for better visibility.

Description

What if you have a number of tiny subplots or images in a figure window and would like to be able to visually inspect them?

Call allowaxestogrow(f) on a figure f with any number of sub-axes.

Then, whenever one of the plots or images is clicked, it immediately grows to the size of the full window (or a pre-set size).

When clicked again, it returns to its original position.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.7 (R2008b)

[Steve Dunn]

Useful scripts. Thanks.

[T W]

Re new version issued 1/6/07 ...
On a page of line subplots, I also have an axes that has the following characteristics:
get(chax,'Type')
ans =
    'patch'
    'text'
    'patch'
This axes causes allowaxestogrow to crash on:
if (strcmp(get(chax,'Type'),'image') || strcmp(get(chax,'Type'),'line'))
with the error ...
??? Operands to the || and && operators must be convertible to logical scalar values.

[Eindhoven de Gekste]

Exactly does what I needed, very easy to implement

[Eindhoven de Gekste]

One thing that should be implemented, is the possibility to return to the original subplots figure, after zooming in on a magnified subplot (to me that seems impossible at the moment).

[Matt Caywood]

Eindhoven, this program already does allow axes to be zoomed in and out.

It relies on Matlab being able to trap clicks on certain features of the plot. Sometimes when a plot is very complex and axes are large, clicks do not register as readily as they do when the axis is small.

Try clicking on different objects in the plot, or reordering the objects in the plot. Or, you can add "set(obj,'ButtonDownFcn',@shrinksubplot);" to different objects obj in the plot to make them triggers for zooming out.

[Jonas]

Very neat piece of code!

I use it to allow a user to select ROIs on images in subplots. To make sure that the axes aspect ratio is preserved (otherwise, the ROI looks much different on zooming), I modified line 56 the following way (maybe you should also copy DataAspectRatioMode):

iax = axes('Position',get(ax,'Position'), 'PlotBoxAspectRatioMode',get(ax,'PlotBoxAspectRatioMode'), 'NextPlot','add');

[Jackson Shen]

 

[Bass]

Nice tool.
Unfortunately, if you try and use the zoom/pan tools after applying allowaxestogrow to your figure they don't work NOR does allowaxestogrow zoom functionality

[Yuri Kotliarov]

Works great! Thanks.

[Matt Caywood]

Bass, this is designed to replace the built-in figure zoom/pan tools, which I found slow and inadequate.

I believe the reason it doesn't work with them is that we overlay the original plot with an invisible patch that reliably traps mouse clicks. So you're zooming & panning the invisible patch, not the plot.

If instead you attach the togglesubplot event handler to the original plot, you can use it with the zoom/pan controls -- but then the grow/shrink control won't be very reliable.

[GERMÁN]

you could place the code example. I have a error when running the program.
Thanks