How do I use custom line styles within MATLAB?

In other programs, the most common extra line style is a dash-dot-dot line. Other line styles that are available are a dash-dot-dot-dot line, a long dash line, a short dash line (may look similar to the dotted line in MATLAB depending on renderer settings), a short dash-dot line, a long dash-dot line, and more widely or closely spaced dash lines.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

There are only four line styles available in MATLAB: 'solid', 'dotted', 'dashdot', and 'dashed'. For more information on available line styles colors and symbols type:

doc plot

at the MATLAB command prompt.

To work around this issue you can use traditional plotting techniques in MATLAB to simulate, for example, a '|' linestyle.

Here is an example which takes two vectors, "x" and "y", and reformats them so that a simple plot statement will generate a '|' graph. The example inserts 2 new elements between each original element of the old vector. Then, NaN values are inserted into both "x" and "y "to create a break in the data set. Next, a small increment "y + a" is inserted into the new "y" matrix to give each point height.

function h = plotbar(x,y)

%PLOTBAR Plot two vectors simulating a '|' linestyle

%     h = plotbar(x,y) returns a handle to the line created.

x = x(:);

y = y(:);

newx = zeros(1,length(x)*3);

newx(1:3:end) = x;

newx(2:3:end) = x;

newx(3:3:end) = nan;

newy = zeros(1,length(y)*3);

newy(1:3:end) = y;

newy(2:3:end) = y+((max(y)-min(y))/20);

newy(3:3:end) = nan;

h = plot(newx,newy);

Here are some examples of the use of this function:

plotbar(1:10,1:10);

plotbar(rand(10),rand(10));

plotbar(magic(5),inv(magic(5)));