Matlab plots tutorial
Tags: matlab, computerscience, tutorial, plots
Published: 2021-11-20 11:17:05


Introduction

In this tutorial we will look at some basic functionalities of matlab figures. We will see some examples and understand how to use functions such as plot and stem.

---

- **figure** creates a new figure window using default property values. The resulting figure is the current figure.

Example:
- figure(Name,Value) modifies properties of the figure using one or more name-value pair arguments. For example, figure('Color','Red') sets the background color to red (same as figure('Color','r')

--- 

### Creating one discrete and one 2D line plot in the same figure ###

```
figure("Color", "c"); %adds cyan color at the background of matlab % figure 
%Creates a vector of 100 evenly spaced points in the interval 
%[-5,5].
Y = linspace(-5,5,50);
plot(Y, "r:") % plots Y against an implicit set of x-coordinates.
% adds red color to line (from r) and makes it dotted (from :)
hold on % use hold on to add a second plot
stem(Y, "c") % plott discrete sequence data
% c makes line have cyan color
```
![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/rfi4ih5w7f8m4eoxw49j.jpg)

---

Adding grid to your figures:

- **grid**= Display or hide axes grid lines

1) grid on = displays the major grid lines for the current axes 

2) grid off = removes all grid lines from the current axes or chart.

3) grid minor = Display the minor grid lines.

---

- **scatter** = Scatter plot

- **tiledlayout** = Create tiled chart layout

Example:

**tiledlayout(m,n)** = creates a tiled chart layout for displaying multiple plots in the current figure. The layout has a fixed m-by-n tile arrangement that can display up to m*n plots.   

---

Example no 2:

```
clc;
clear; 
figure("Color", "c"); 
x = linspace(0,3*pi,200); %Create a vector of 100 points in the interval [0,3π,200].
y = cos(x) + rand(1,200);
t = tiledlayout(2,2); 

title(t,'Title of our figure') % add title
xlabel(t,'X label')% add x label
ylabel(t,'Y label')% add y label
t.TileSpacing = 'compact'; %Decrease the amount of space between the tiles by setting the TileSpacing property to 'compact'
t.Padding = 'compact'; %decrease the space between the edges of the layout and the edges of the figure by setting the Padding property to 'compact'.

% add your plots in the same figure:
ax1 = nexttile;
ax1.XColor = [1 1 1];
ax1.YColor = [1 0 0];
scatter(ax1,x,y);
grid on
title('Sample 1');
 
ax2 = nexttile;
scatter(ax2,x,y,'filled','d');
title('Sample 2');

nexttile(t);
bar([10 22 31 43 52])
title('Sample 3');

nexttile(t);

x = linspace(-10,10,200); %Create x as 200 linearly spaced values between -10 and 10.
y = cos(x); % Create y as the cosine of x.
plot(x,y)
%Change the tick value locations along the x-axis and y-axis. 
%Specify the locations as a vector of increasing values. The values do not need to be evenly spaced.
xticks([-3*pi -2*pi -pi 0 pi 2*pi 3*pi])
xticklabels({'-3\pi','-2\pi','-\pi','0','\pi','2\pi','3\pi'}) %Also, change the labels associated with each tick value along the x-axis. To include special characters or Greek letters in the labels, use TeX markup, such as \pi for the π symbol
yticks([-1 -0.8 -0.2 0 0.2 0.8 1])
```




![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/dmbxwwbvpbxr8bm22fv6.png)