Font size in App Designer Tabs

Nearly every App Designer component (like uibutton or uieditfield) has a property "FontSize". However, neither uitabgroup nor uitab has this property.

Is there any hack to manipulate the font size of a tab group in App Designer?

Answer 1

[Paul Elliott]

I know this is an old post. But I've searched for an answer numerous times. At the time of posting this,83 others had read this post in the past 30 days at this time. I am maybe 5 of those.

First, Matlab's GUI leaves a lot to be desired. There really is no excuse for not developing a set of 'properties' that allow the font size in the tabs to be changed. But after 7 years, it is obviously not a priority, and doubtful to be changed.

I find that the tabs are the easist way to organize a program with several options. They are integral in our GUI's for simplicity. With that we had to find a solution that worked. I've read solutions that suggest simply enabling and disabling things based on a button but that creates a total mess when trying to layout the GUI. This is a goofy work around but a simple one. It maintains the use of the tab group and does not require any 3rd party control apps etc. The simplicity of this and the fact that Matlab has never suggested this as a solution, at least not that I've found, seems to support the notion that GUI's are an afterthought for Mathworks.

Our solution is to create a button group and simply overlay the actual tab selectors. We then change tabs to display based on the button that is pushed using callback functions on the individual buttons. You can simply delete the label, "button group" that Matlab automatically displays, and then end up with 1 box within which the buttons can be placed.

I attached 1 image with the button group above a tab group, and another where the button group has been placed over the tab selectors. For exageration, I made the buttons 25pt font and the tabs remained their base 12pt font.

I hope this helps some people. I'm interested in better solutions.

Answer 2

[Mabin Mariam Joseph]

This capability is not available in MATLAB.

There is third-party toolbox that allows changing the font size of "uitab" objects called GUI Layout Toolbox:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/47982-gui-layout-toolbox

You can download this toolbox and install it into MATLAB to use.

You can create a TabPanel using uix.TabPanel and then change its FontSize property.

[Benjamin Berger]

Thanks for your answer.

I wished and prayed that there was some (undocomented) possibility witch App Designer. Since App Designer is the future, I would like to use that tool. Maybe there exists some sort of hack, like in UndocumentedMatlab.com.

Anyway, thanks for your link to the toolbox. I will look into it after my holidays. Since I´m kind of frustrated with this topic, I´m considering to change to another tool.

[Lee]

hmmm, Mathworks staff suggesting using a thrid party toolbox to create a tabgroup, that would render the entire interface incompatible with the AppDesigner - maybe you should consider just adding control of fontsize, or ribbon height/width to AppDesigner? crazy suggestion I know...

[Benjamin Berger]

Dear Lee,

thank you for your comment, but I changed the whole software engineering to C++ with Qt for GUIs. Matlab App Designer hat too much bugs.

BR

[Adam Gogacz]

I went over to Python a few years back because MATLAB was just too restrictive.

[Philipp Rost]

ridiculous answer, and t's even worse, because the behavior of this tabgroups has changed from 2020b to 2022b. Now in 22b the tabgroub will no longer expand it's width. Therefore, from now on I can no longer read the full content of my tabs.