force a scientific notation format

hi,

when i use this code, instead of forcing it to give me the x-axis as: 0,1,2,...,10 then x10^3 (3 is a superscript) it gives me the numbers as 1000,2000,...and so on...any idea?

    x = 0:0.1e4:0.1e5;
y = randn(11,1);
plot(x,y,'b-o')
set(gca,'xtick',0:0.1e4:0.1e5);

[José-Luis]

Alex, please learn to edit your code, it makes it easier for people to read and understand your questions.

[Sam Alex]

Well, then tell me how Luis...I am a newbie here but I am eager to be smart like you people

Sorry if my question annoyed you

[José-Luis]

Please have a look here. And your question did not annoy me, I was just posting a suggestion.

As a general rule, people will be more inclined to answer a well posed, clear question. When I see unedited text posed as a question I often tend to ignore it, unless it is very short (like yours was). Other contributors might be more dedicated, but I think a nice presentation increases your chances for an answer.

[neo]

I think following link may help:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/15986

I also feel this is a problem. The obvious solution would have been to edit XTickLabel using latex/tex interpreter. But Matlab help clearly states that one can not use latex/tex for axis tick labels. So solutions like above replaces them by text objects and then use latex/tex interpreter.

I Wonder how matlab does it for log-log or semilog plots or when axis limit exceeds about 10^5 or similar cases.

Answer 1

[José-Luis]

 x = 0:0.1e4:0.1e5; 
 y = randn(11,1); 
 plot(x,y,'b-o')
 xVals = 0:0.1e4:0.1e5;
 set(gca,'xtick',xVals);

 set(gca,'XTickLabel',sprintf('%2.0e|',xVals));

The last line in the previous snippet sets the format for your XTickLabels. For more information on other formats:

 doc sprintf

EDIT Exponent should appear at the right of the X-axis

 x = 0:0.1e4:0.1e5; 
 y = randn(11,1); 
 plot(x,y,'b-o')
 xVals = 0:0.1e4:0.1e5;
 set(gca,'xtick',xVals);
 expVal = 3; %exponent you want
 set(gca,'XTickLabel',sprintf('%2.0f|',xVals./(10^expVal)));

 pos = get(gca,'Position');
 offset = 0.00; %how far to the right you want the exponent
 annotation('textbox',[pos(1)+ pos(3)+offset, pos(2), 0.2, 0.2],...
    'String',['$\times 10^' num2str(expVal) '$'],...
    'Interpreter','latex',...
    'VerticalAlignment','bottom',...
    'EdgeColor','none')

[Sam Alex]

This prints values as: 0e+000 and so on. What I want is to print 0,1,2,3...10 and then at the end of the axis it prints x10^3

Thanks

[José-Luis]

Please see edited answer

[Sam Alex]

Thank you José-Luis

[José-Luis]

My pleasure

Answer 2

[Jonathan Epperl]

Afaik that's not possible, since the tick labels aren't like normal text objects in that they support a subset of latex commands. I recommend tick2text ( http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/16003-tick2text-create-easy-to-customize-tick-labels ) from the FEX. Once you have it on your Matlab path:

x = 10.^(1:10);
plot(x,x)
g = gca;
tick2text(g,'axis','x')
h = getappdata(g,'XTickText')
for i=1:numel(h), set(h(i),'String',num2str(i,'10^%d')); end

[José-Luis]

What do you mean it's not possible? You can set XTickLabel to whatever string you want, even if it has nothing to do with the numeric value. You can't use Latex as the interpreter though, I'll agree to that, but that's not relevant for what the op asked, if I understood correctly.