Insert xticks in bold in existing xticks

Hi,

I would like to make some change to the xticks of my plot without doing it manually.

So far i'm changing xticks of certain values by a text with :

names = {'text1'; 'text2'; 'text3'};
plot(...
set(gca,'xtick',[position1, position2, position3],'xticklabel',names)

The downside is that now I only have those 3 texts displaying in the x axis. I would like to have the default ticks PLUS those texts at those positions (in bold if possible). And just erase default ticks that are at those 3 positions.

Example if I have on the x axis the labels:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

I would like to have :

1, 2, text1, 4, 5, text2, 7, text3

How can I do this?

Answer 1

[dpb]

You've got to write the same number of tick labels as ticks and place the non-automatic text in the locations desired, explicitly. There's not sufficient syntax to write a portion of the 'XTickLabel' array alone.

hAx=axes;                          % make an axes to play with
xlim([1 8])                        % set limits
xlbl=xticklabels;                  % retrieve default labels
ix=[3 6 8];                        % define those to change
for i=1:length(ix)                 % make up the new ones for those locations...
  xlbl(ix(i))={num2str(i,'\\bfText%d')};
end
xticklabels(xlbl)                  % and write them back.

[mael thevenot]

Thanks for your answer, however I did not manage to make it work? I have an error at the 3rd line you wrote: Undefined function or variable 'xticklabels'.

And I don't understand the first line : "hAx = axes" ?

[dpb]

doc xticklabels
 ...
xl = xticklabels returns the x-axis tick labels for the current axes.
 ...
Introduced in R2016b

If your release is earlier, then you'll have to use

xlbl=hAx.XTickLabel;

or if even earlier than R2014, then

xlbl=get(hAx,'XTickLabel');

Somehow you've got to get the existing tick label array to operate on.

hAx=axes;

just created an axis to demonstrate with; use the handle to the axes object you're trying to add the labels. For the current axes, use

hAx=gca;

to get the handle into a variable instead of calling the function every time; gca can (and will) change which axes is returned if focus is changed, saving the handle to a variable ensures you're writing to the one intended.

[mael thevenot]

Ok thanks, yeah I'm using R2015b, so the

xlbl=hAx.XTickLabel;

worked. Also now I've understood that I have to use

hAx=gca;

So right now my code is :

hAx=gca;                          % make an axes to play with
xlbl=hAx.XTickLabel;;             % retrieve default labels
ix=[value1 value2 value3];        % define those to change
% for i=1:length(ix)              % make up the new ones for those locations...
%   xlbl(ix(i))={num2str(i,'\\bfText%d')};
% end

The only thing I did not success to do is to write those values back in my axis, since I can't use

xticklabels(xlbl)

How do I do that? I've tried some things like

hAx.XTickLabel(xlbl)

but I always have an error, like for this one: Function 'subsindex' is not defined for values of class 'cell'.

Do you know how to re-write this command in the 2015 release? I did not find the answer in the documentation. Many thanks for your help so far :)