Plot multiple Lines and keep them in one handle

Hi everybody,

I want to plot many (round about 30.000) 2D-lines in a plot. A line has only change in y-axis.

For example:

tolerance_1 = [2 3 4 5 6 7 8];
tolerance_2 = [1 2 3 4 5 6 7];
x = [1 2 3 4 5 6 7];
line1 = plot ([x(1) x(1)], [tolerance_1(1) tolerance_2(1)], 'r-');

It is no problem to plot all the lines with a for-loop. But I need to keep for all the lines a handle so I can set the lines visible and invisible. When I create a vector with the length of the number of lines (round about 30.000) and fill it with all the handles, my MATLAB crashes. Is there a possibility to get a single handle to all the lines?

I tried something like that:

mylines = plot([x x],[tolerance_1 tolerance_2],'r-')

But this does not work because the single lines are connected.

Does anybody know a solution?

Thank you very much and have a nice day. :-)

[Adam]

How can you possibly make any sense of a plot with 30,000 lines on it? It sounds like it needs a rethink of what you are doing. Each line will be its own graphics object unless you connect them all to be a single line, but I thought the point of what you wanted was to be able to switch off (make invisible) individual lines anyway?

[Stephen23]

30000 lines in one figure? At typical modern monitor sizes (e.g. 1920x1080) those lines would be totally indistinguishable. You would need a monitor with well more than ten times higher resolution... does anything like that even exist? I guess you have a rather large IT budget.

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

Plotting in a loop is a waste of MATLAB:

tol1 = [2 3,4,5,6,7,8];
tol2 = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7];
x = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7];
lnh = plot([x;x],[tol1;tol2],'*-');

producing:

[bigsmile96]

Hi,

thank you very much, this is exactly what I was looking for!

[Stephen23]

@bigsmile96: note that you might also like to read about the line ColorOrder:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/graphics_transition/why-are-plot-lines-different-colors.html

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/axes-properties.html#property_d0e55094

and see the "Examples" for how to change it:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/45208-colorbrewer--attractive-and-distinctive-colormaps

[Javier Cabello]

Awesome! I also had a similar problem, just multple straight lines in a plot. Simple and elegant solution, without bending myself backward (and crashing the computer) with loops.