How do I insert special tick labels onto an axis?

I have a vector of years and corresponding depths which I would like to plot in a bar chart. The years are labelled on the x axis. Say these years are 1800, 1820, 1840, 1860, ...., 1980. The first data point is at 1818. However, I would like to label one special year of 1788 on the x-axis before these automatic labels, with the y values being 0 for each x-axis point until 1818, which is the first one.

I have added the point (1788,0) to my data set which I am plotting, however I am having trouble adding the label at an appropriate distance relative to all the other labels.

This is what I have previously tried:

set(gca, 'xticklabel', {1788, 1800, 1820, 1840, 1860, 1880, 1900, 1920, 1940, 1960, 1980}) However, this gives me the label '1788' on the x-axis at the same spacing as all the other labels, but I want it to be positioned at the appropriate scale.

I have also tried With xticksat= [1788] but this doesn't work at all and gives me an error when I try to run the function.

Does anybody have any suggestions?

Help would be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

It may be necessary to define the 'XTick' locations as well.

See if this does what you want:

x = [1788, 1800, 1820, 1840, 1860, 1880, 1900, 1920, 1940, 1960, 1980];
y = randi(25, 11, 1);           % Created Data

figure(1)
bar(x, y)
set(gca, 'XTick', x, 'xticklabel', {1788, 1800, 1820, 1840, 1860, 1880, 1900, 1920, 1940, 1960, 1980})

[Monica La]

Thank you Star Strider! That solution ended up giving me labels for every single point in my x-axis data, in between each of the specified values too, so they were too hard to read. However just using ' set(gca, 'XTick', [1788,1800,1820,1840, 1860, 1880, 1900, 1920, 1940, 1960, 1980]) ' worked!

Thanks for your help!

[Star Strider]

My pleasure!

It didn’t do that when I ran the same code in R2014b, so there may be version differences. Another option is to use the 'FontSize' option to reduce the size of the tick labels. In R2014b it is also possible to rotate them, although in earlier versions you have to use the text function if you want to rotate the tick labels.