interactivelegend

Highlights and identifies a selected plot object.

This function enables a set of plot objects to become interactive. The mouse pointer becomes a crosshair, and selected plots are highlighted (that is, brought to the top of the axes, colored red and drawn with a linewidth of 2).

An optional text tag is also drawn with the same color, thus replacing the need for a conventional legend, which can become cumbersome when lots of plots are present in the same axes. By default, shown tags are the plot's 'Tag' property, but they can also be provided as an optional argument.

Only one plot remains highlighted at a time; when the user clicks on the axes background, all plots return to their unselected state.

An optional structure can be passed to the function to adjust the look of highlighted plots and text tags.

Usage example:

 p = plot(randn(40,5));
 set(p,'Color',[0.6 0.6 0.6]);
 tags = {'A','B','C','D','E'};
 interactivelegend(p,tags);

Note that the following syntaxes would also work:

 interactivelegend(gca,tags);

See also the contributed function "linelabel" by Scott Hirsch, which behaves similarly but with persistent tags.