Why do the labels of the last tick marks disappear when I set axes location to origin?

The data I'm plotting requires both axes to be at the origin for easy interpretation. For some reason when axes location is set at origin, the labels of the final tick marks disappear. I have no idea how to fix this and I'd rather not resort to moving the axes manually or typing the labels in Illustrator.

Here is the lines of code causing the problem:

ax.XAxisLocation = 'origin'

ax.YAxisLocation = 'origin'

Has anyone encountered this problem before?

[dpb]

That's related to HG2 which I can't test, but...

Try

ax.XXTickLabel

at command line and see if the last array element is blank. If so, setting it to the value of tick locations that can be obtained from

xt=ax.XTick

should display it.

That behavior would sorta' indicate it was a TMW decision to incorporate symmetry in not displaying the last tick to match up with the opposite end (which doesn't look all that bad and I notice you didn't circle them :) ).

OTOH, if the tick label property isn't blank, it's a rendering problem internally and will need a bug fix in all likelihood.

Let us know the result of the above; somebody w/ HG2 installed is bound to be along to test.

[Hesham Buhedma]

The other ends are supposed to be labeled too but I forgot to circle them, my bad :)

I checked both the XTick and YTick label arrays and all values are there. I'm not sure what HG2 is though, I'm using matlab 2016a.

[dpb]

HG2 --> "HandleGraphics 2". The new incarnation of the Matlab graphics engine introduced at (I think?) R2015. Your release incorporates it as the 'origin' value for the axis locations didn't exist in HG1.

OK, so you're saying that

ax.XTickLabel

at the command line does show entries for all tick marks? Hmmm...let me think; are there any other properties can think of that could have that effect other than a bug...

Well, there's also a new 'ruler' object that didn't used to exist...wonder if it could be it's overriding the main axis properties.

Try

ax.XAxis.TickLabels

and see if they're also all set (and, of course, obvious modification for Y).

If one of those is missing, try

ax.XAxis.TickLabels = ax.XaxisTickValues

and see if that will cause them to appear.

If not, it's time for a question to TMW Support @ www.mathworks.com, I'm outta' ideas (and as say, don't have HG2 so can't poke around here).

You can make a short-term fixup by writing the missing labels via text but it's a pita to have to do so, granted.

[Hesham Buhedma]

Tried ax.XAxis.TickLabels but the results are correct too. My plot is fairly simple so I don't think I'm overriding anything (just marker size, color...etc). This is frustrating so I think I'll contact TMW support.

Thanks for trying dpb!

[dpb]

It may turn out to be a "feature" that somebody at TMW thought was cute but it may just be a bug. HG2 is still pretty new out of the box so finding warts isn't too surprising.

You understand how to programmatically use text to write the missing labels, right?

TMW may give you a clever workaround so I'd try that firstest.

[Hesham Buhedma]

I'm not sure how to use text to do that, I'll research it. I already rewrote the whole script in python and everything works great.

[dpb]

Quick demo...

hAx=axes;
xlim([-1000 3000])
set(hAx,'xtick',0:1000:2000)

Above reproduces your x axis appearance bestest can do without the 'origin' keyword that is lacking in HG1.

Now if resetting 'xtick' and/or 'xticklabel' won't cause the ticks to reappear as I understand is the situation you're facing,

tvalues=[-1000;3000];
hT=text(tvalues,-0.015*[1;1],num2str(tvalues), ...
         'verticalalign','top', ...
         'horizontalalign','center');

will write text at the tick label locations.

The coordinates are in data units so you may have to play with the y units a little owing to scaling of the y-axis to other than 0:1 scaling but the 1.5% ratio should get you close.

You can fix this by using relative units in which the spacing is relative to the overall axes position which is then data-scale independent.

As noted, I'd see it Tech Support gives a workaround or points out what I/we are overlooking w/ HG2.

[ET]

I also had this problem, R2019a.

Annoying. Any answers?

Answer 1

[J. Scott Berg]

If hAx is the axes object, then hAx.YAxis is the NumericRuler object for the Y axis. It has an undocumented property TickLabelChild, which has a String property with the actual strings that are rendered. If you look at hAx.YAxis.TickLabelChild.String, you will find that the label is missing even though it appears in hAx.YAxis.TickLabels. So, you can set up hAx.YAxis.TickLabels how you like it, then do

set(ax.YAxis.TickLabelChild,'String',ax.YAxis.TickLabels)

to have them rendered properly. Do this after you have set the axis limits, tics, etc. If you subsequently do anything that would change axis limits, number of tick labels, etc., first do

set(ax.YAxis.TickLabelChild,'StringMode','auto')

otherwise it may be unhappy about the number of stings in the TickLabelChild not matching up with the number of ticks in the NumericRuler parent.

None of this appears to be documented, so it may not work in your version.