changing color while using 'hist' in a bar-plot

Hi there

When using the 'hist' option while plotting a bar figure, I can't seem to figure out how to change the facecolor and the edgecolor of the bars. Specifically I would like both to be red. This is easily changed using bar(data), but using bar(data,'hist'), those options seem unavailable. Using the example from mathworks.com:

y = [75.995 91.972 105.711 123.203 131.669 ...
     150.697 179.323 203.212 226.505 249.633 281.422];

bar(y,'facecolor','r','EdgeColor','r'); ---> WORKS

bar(y,'hist','facecolor','r','EdgeColor','r'); ---> DOES NOT WORK.

I guess the problem is that I have to write the correct property-value pair for 'hist' when using other property-value pairs simultaneously, but I can't figure out which property 'hist' is part of.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

[Sam Roberts]

Try:

h = bar(y,'hist');
set(h,'FaceColor','r','EdgeColor','r');

If you take a look at the doc page for bar, you'll see that with the 'hist' option you can't pass in additional parameter/value pairs. In addition, while the main form of bar returns a barseries object, with the 'hist' option it returns patches. You can grab a handle to the patches and set the colors yourself as above.

[Jakob Sievers]

Thank you for this advice. It worked beautifully.

[Cesar Toledo]

How is this done? How can I grab the handle of the patches?