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Noah Prisament

Navigating the MATLAB Graphics Tree

Noah Prisament on 29 Jan 2024
Latest activity Reply by Chen Lin on 2 Feb 2024

A key aspect to masting MATLAB Graphics is getting a hang of the MATLAB Graphics Object Hierarchy which is essentially the structure of MATLAB figures that is used in the rendering pipeline. The base object is the Graphics Root (see groot) which contains the Figure. The Figure contains Axes or other containers such as a Tiled Chart Layout (see tiledlayout). Then these Axes can contain graphics primatives (the objects that contain data and get rendered) such as Lines or Patches.
Every graphics object has two important properties, the "Parent" and "Children" properties which can be used to access other objects in the tree. This can be very useful when trying to customize a pre-built chart (such as adding grid lines to both axes in an eye diagram chart) or when trying to access the axes of a non-current figure via a primative (so "gca" doesn't help out).
One last Tip and Trick with this is that you can declare graphics primatives without putting them on or creating an Axes by setting the first input argument to "gobjects(0)" which is an empty array of placeholder graphics objects. Then, when you have an Axes to plot the primitive on and are ready to render it, you can set the "Parent" of the object to your new Axes.
For Example:
l = line(gobjects(0), 1:10, 1:10);
...
...
...
l.Parent = gca;
Practicing navigating and exploring this tree will help propel your understanding of plotting in MATLAB.

2 Comments

Chen Lin
Chen Lin on 2 Feb 2024
Such useful tips! Thanks for sharing.
Hans Scharler
Hans Scharler on 30 Jan 2024
I didn't know the gobjects(0) trick. Thanks!

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