The fact there is no built in way to control their appearance within Matlab is shocking... As an alternative, I can only suggest using a toggle button group, combined with a bunch of layered panels that you control the visibility of. However, I have worked like this and it makes editting the layout a pain because you have to keep reordering the panels, and it's easy to lose access to one behind the others, especially with many 'tabs'.
Please Matlab, how hard is it to add font size to the properties? And have the tab ribbon itself expand to accomodate the larger text - or better yet a dimension on the ribbon height/width?
