MATLAB-Personalized-Plotter

A function that helps make the plotting processes for MATLAB leaner.

MATLAB-Personalized-Plotter

This is a simple tool (both in usage and development) that serves the purpose of simplifying and generalizing the process of plotting in MATLAB.

Despite the fact that MATLAB's plotting environment and mechanics in general are highly advanced and flexible, one still needs to write a lot of lines of code in order to enrich a plot.

Main idea

The way to use the function has the following general structure:

plot_in_my_style(...
    {x1, ..., xn},...
    {y1, ..., yn},...
    Figure_Title,...
    arg_type_1,...            % <----- optional argument of "type 1"
    arg_type_2, identifier)   % <----- optional argument of "type 2" and its identifier

Explanation:

The user first provides the fixed arguments:

1. A cell variable containing all x-axis signals.
2. A cell variable containing all y-axis signals that correspond to the x-axis signals (couples of (x1,y1), ..., (xn,yn)).
3. A string variable that represents the title of the figure.

Then, the user can provide optional/variable arguments that must adhere to only a few rules:

Both types of optional arguments (must be of type: string) signal to the function to include additional plot properties.

1. The first one ('arg_type_1') does not require an identifier receding it.
2. The second one ('arg_type_2') requires an identifier receding it.

This concept is not very different than how "plot" is already used in MATLAB, however it is made much more compact. All necessary commands of a plot are inserted in the function and are activated by a variable argument that is of much simpler expression. For example, in order to plot two signals that have vastly different orders of magnitute, therefore needing to have two distinct y-axes, in MATLAB one would need to write:

% using "plot" function to graph two signals in separate y-axes 
yyaxis left
plot(xl, y_left)
yyaxis right
plot(xr, y_right)

whereas with the "plot in my style", one can write it much more easily and intuitively:

plot_in_my_style(...
    {xl, xr}, ...
    {y_left, y_right}, 'title', ...
    'sepY')

OR

plot_in_my_style(...
    {xl, xr}, ...
    {y_left, y_right}, 'title', ...
    'separate-Y')

This is better, not to mention the default style options that the user encapsulates inside the function at all times!

How to use

Open MATLAB, add the functions provided in the repository to your path and type "help plot_in_my_style" in order to run some examples.

How to customize

It is really easy to customize the function. If, for example, one needs to frequently plot in "dark mode", which is better for the eyes during the evening, they would only need to add:

plot_in_my_style(...
    {xl, xr}, ...
    {y_left, y_right}, 'title', ...
    'separate-Y',...
    'dark')

instead of having to remember to write:

set(gca,[0 0 0], 'GridColor', 'green')

which is the proper built-in way

For this example, with the "dark" option, the user only needs to get inside the function, find the variable usr_map and add a new cell element that contains two components. The 1st component is a cell that contains the variable arguments, in the way that they can be formulated in order to signal to the function to print in "dark mode". For example, I have written: {'dark', 'black', 'night'}. So, if the user provides an argument that matches one of the components of the aforegiven cell variable, the function will print in dark mode. The second element of the main cell specifies the name of the conditional variable that corresponds to the user command (e.g., if we write 'is_dark_plot', then later on in the function we can use the boolean variable is_dark_plot to create the commands needed to plot in dark mode). The 2nd element of this sub-cell corresponds to the identifier of the variable argument (if there is none, simply write '~' to let the function know).