Modifying Plot Appearances
Video Walk through
Video Walk through Below is a quick video which walks through the conversion process.
Making a plot visually ready for a presentation can be a very tedious task. This is why the Analyzer has an appearance customization tool, which helps makes this process quick and easy.
Before detailing how to use this tool, it’s important to understand what is considered a ‘figure’ and what it means to have that figure ‘selected’. A figure is anything produced by the Analyzer which contains a plot of some sort, and the currently selected figure is the figure which was last opened or clicked on.
When modifying a value in the appearances window, the changes will be immediately applied only to the selected plot. Also, every subsequent figure generated will have its appearances modified to be consistent with the preferences contained in the appearances window.
| Number In Diagram | Title | Description |
| 1 | Grid lines | Toggles a plot’s grid lines |
| 2 | Tick markers | Toggles a plot’s tick markers. While tick markers are disabled, grid lines cannot be enabled (will be disabled automatically and become unselectable), and this will persist until the tick markers are re-enabled. |
| 3 | Line color | To specify a line color, click on the rectangular box showing the currently used color, and a pop-up window will appear. The pop-up will allow you to choose a color from a set of ‘standard’ colors, or specify the color as an RGB or hex value. |
| 4 | Line style | The line style selects what type of line is desired, the options are solid, dashed, dotted, and dashed-dot |
| 5 | Line thickness | Dictates how thick all the plotted lines are, in PostScript Points (1/72 inches). The default for the Analyzer (and MatLab in general) is a thickness of 0.5 |
| 6 | Figure background color | Specifies the figure background color |
| 7 | Plot background color | Specifies the plot background color |
| 8 | Colormap selection |
The colormap can be chosen through the dropdown menu, which lists the available colormaps (as their names). The default colormap is ‘Plasma’, which is chosen as it’s a perceptually uniform colormap. |
| 9 | Colormap sample | A visualization of the selected colormap, it will change whenever a new colormap has been selected from the colormap selection dropdown directly above. |
| 10 | Figure height / width | Specifies the height and width of the figure in pixels. This area excludes the figure borders, title bar, menu bar, and tool bars. |
| 11 | Legend | Toggles a legend for the plot or subplots |
| 12 | Text color | Changes the color of the title, x-label, and y-label for the plot |
| 13 | Font Selection | Pressing this button will open a pop-up window allowing you to specify the font, style (e.g. bold), and the size of the text. When you’re satisfied with your selections (can be checked using the given text sample), pressing the ‘OK’ button will save your preferences |
| 14 | Plot title override | When non-empty, the text in this field will override the title for plots (excluding Complex FFT plots) |
| 15 | Plot X-axis override | When non-empty, the text in this field will override the X-axis label on plots (or subplots if multiple plots exist on a single figure) |
| 16 | Plot Y-axis override | When non-empty, the text in this field will override the Y-axis label on plots (or subplots if multiple plots exist on a single figure) |