GRAPHICS in MATLAB

The MATLAB environment offers a variety of data plotting functions plus a set of GUI tools to create, and modify graphic displays. The GUI tools afford most of the control over graphic properties and options that typed commands such as annotate, get, and set provide.A figure is a MATLAB window that contains graphic displays (usually data plots) and UI components. You create figures explicitly with the figure function, and implicitly whenever you plot graphics and no figure is active.By default, figure windows are resizable and include pull-down menus and toolbars. A plot is any graphic display you can create within a figure window. Plots can display tabular data, geometric objects, surface and image objects, and annotations such as titles, legends, and colorbars. Figures can contain any number of plots. Each plot is created within a 2-D or a 3-D data space called an axes. You can explicitly create axes with the axes or subplot functions.A graph is a plot of data within a 2-D or 3-D axes. Most plots made with MATLAB functions and GUIs are therefore graphs. When you graph a one-dimensional variable (e.g., rand(100,1)), the indices of the data vector (in this case 1:100) become assigned as x values, and plots the data vector as y values. Some types of graphs can display more than one variable at a time, others cannot. Figures, plots and graphs in MATLAB are explained in this book.