MATLAB:Plotting

This page will primarily go over some examples of different ways to plot data sets.

Using Different Line Styles

Most of the time, you will be plotting three or fewer different lines on a single window, and they can thus be distinguished from one another in MATLAB by using different line styles. There are two different ways to get multiple data sets plotted in the same figure - use the hold on...hold off paradigm or pu all the "plot triplets" in a single plot command. What follows is an example of the latter case:

x = linspace(0, 1, 100);
y1 = x.^0.5;
y2 = x.^1;
y3 = x.^2;
plot(x, y1, 'k-', x, y2, 'k--', x, y3, 'k:');
legend('y=x^{0.5}', 'y=x', 'y=x^2', 0);
title('y=x^n for Three Values of n (mrg)');
xlabel('x');
ylabel('y');
print -deps CurvePlot % note that adds .eps to filename

The figure this creates will be:

Note the legend - the use of the final argument 0 will make MATLAB look for the best spot in the window for the legend - which is to say, somewhere not conflicting with any of the lines if at all possible. Also note that the text in the legend and in the title contains basic LaTeX code for obtaining the superscripts.