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MATLAB provides a great variety of functions
and techniques for graphical display of data. The flexibility andease of use of MATLAB's plotting tools is one of its key strengths.
In MATLAB graphs are shown in a figure window. Several figurewindows can be displayed simultaneously, but only one is active.
All graphing commands are applied to the active figure. The command
figure(n) will activate figure number
n or create a new figure indexed by
n .
In this section we present some of the most commonly used functions for plotting in MATLAB.
plot - The plot and stem functions can take a large
number of arguments, see help plot and help stem. For example theline type and color can easily be changed.
plot(y) plots the values in vector
y versus their index.
plot(x,y) plots the values in vector
y versus
x . The
plot function produces a piecewise linear graph between
its data values. With enough data points it lookscontinuous.stem - Using
stem(y) the data sequence
y is plotted as stems from the x-axis terminated with
circles for the data values.
stem is the natural way of plotting sequences.
stem(x,y) plots the data sequence
y at the values specified in
x .xlabel('string') - Labels the x-axis with
string .ylabel('string') - Labels the y-axis with
string .title('string') - Gives the plot the title
string .To illustrate this consider the following example.
In this example we plot the function y = x2 for x 2 [-2; 2].
x = -2:0.2:2;
y = x.^2;
figure(1);
plot(x,y);
xlabel('x');
ylabel('y=x^2');
title('Simple plot');
figure(2);
stem(x,y);
xlabel('x');
ylabel('y=x^2');
title('Simple stem plot');
This code produces the following two figures.
Some more commands that can be helpful when working with plots:
hold on . If you want to overwrite the current plot
again, use
hold off .legend('plot1','plot2',...,'plot N') - The
legend command provides an easy way to identify
individual plots when there are more than one per figure. A legendbox will be added with strings matched to the plots.axis([xmin xmax ymin ymax]) - Use the
axis command to set the axis as you wish. Use
axis on/off to toggle the axis on and off
respectively.subplot(m,n,p) -Divides the figure window into
m rows,
n columns and selects the
p p'th subplot as the current plot, e.g
subplot(2,1,1) divides the figure in two and selects
the upper part.
subplot(2,1,2) selects the lower part.grid on/off - This command adds or removes a
rectangular grid to your plot.This example illustrates
hold ,
legend and
axis .
x = -3:0.1:3; y1 = -x.^2; y2 = x.^2;
figure(1);
plot(x,y1);
hold on;
plot(x,y2,'--');
hold off;
xlabel('x');
ylabel('y_1=-x^2 and y_2=x^2');
legend('y_1=-x^2','y_2=x^2');
figure(2);
plot(x,y1);
hold on;
plot(x,y2,'--');
hold off;
xlabel('x');
ylabel('y_1=-x^2 and y_2=x^2');
legend('y_1=-x^2','y_2=x^2');
axis([-1 1 -10 10]);
The result is shown below.
In this example we illustrate subplot and grid.
x = -3:0.2:3; y1 = -x.^2; y2 = x.^2;
subplot(2,1,1);
plot(x,y1);
xlabel('x'); ylabel('y_1=-x^2');
grid on;
subplot(2,1,2);
plot(x,y2);
xlabel('x');
ylabel('y_2=x^2');
Now, the result is shown below.
After you have created your figures you may want to print them or export them to graphic files. In the "File"menu use "Print" to print the figure or "Save As" to save your figure to one of the many available graphics formats. Using theseoptions should be sufficient in most cases, but there are also a large number of adjustments available by using "Export setup","Page Setup" and "Print Setup".
To streamline the graphics exportation, take a look at exportfig package at Mathworks.com, URL: (External Link) .
We end this module on graphics with a sneak
peek into 3D plots. The new functions here are
meshgrid and
mesh . In the example below we see that
meshgrid produces
x and
y vectors suitable for 3D plotting and that
mesh(x,y,z) plots
z as a function of both
x and
y .
Example: Creating our first 3D plot.
[x,y] = meshgrid(-3:.1:3);
z = x.^2+y.^2;
mesh(x,y,z);
xlabel('x');
ylabel('y');
zlabel('z=x^2+y^2');
This code gives us the following 3D plot.
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