How to ensure text on plot always in front?

Hi all,

I plot some surfaces and label some points on the surface with it's value of z-axis, as shown on the figure. You can see that the black texts on figure 3-4 are all covered by the surfaces. How can I make sure that the black texts are always in front such that they can be seen?

Many thanks!

[José-Luis]

 doc uistack

[Xiaohan Du]

Does it work on 3d plot? I tried it and the text is still behind the surface, nothing changed. This is what I did:

b = text(locx, locy, locz, textToPlot, ...
    'color', '[0 0 0]', 'Fontsize', 12);
uistack(b, 'top')

[José-Luis]

A workaround would be to make your shape a bit transparent. Modify the Alpha property. Otherwise, you could try making your text an annotation.

[José-Luis]

Also, it might be a rendering issue. Have you tried saving to file and looking there.

Testing different renderers might also help.

Answer 1

[Teja Muppirala]

One workaround would be to create an invisible axes on top, and then put the text in there.

figure
ax1 = axes;
mesh(ax1,peaks)
colorbar;
t(1) = text(25,25,1,'My text'); % The text will be obscured by the mesh
t(2) = text(10, 30,-2,'More text');

axHidden = axes('Visible','off','hittest','off'); % Invisible axes
linkprop([ax1 axHidden],{'CameraPosition' 'XLim' 'YLim' 'ZLim' 'Position'}); % The axes should stay aligned
set(t,'Parent',axHidden); % Put the text in the invisible Axes

[Adam]

+1

The last 3 lines are very instructive for numerous similar purposes. I created a solution to one of my problems by adding a second invisible axes on top of my original, but I spent ages messing around with problems caused by zooming, panning, adding a colourbar etc.

This method still causes trouble if you mess about with colourbars on and off, but for zooming and panning it solves all those problems.

[Xiaohan Du]

Hi both,

This is quite complex compare with just making the surfaces transparent, I tried Jose's solution with modifying the Alpha property and it's like this:

I think it's much better.