How do I change the text output in Live Scripts?

In a Live Script, I make some calculations and want to print out the result. I am using fprintf to do this. For example:

s='text output';

fprintf('Text value is %s',s);

The live script then prints out:

Text value is text output

How do I change the font, the font size, or the font style of the output?

I have tried to change font size in preferences, but none of the options change the font size of the live script output. If I zoom, it zooms everything (live script text as well as the output).

Thanks for any help you can offer

Rodney

Answer 1

[Ankit]

@Rodney Smith Please try following links to change the font, font size and font style.

Colorizing text output » MATLAB Community - MATLAB & Simulink (mathworks.com)

for bold:

fprintf('Hello <strong> bold </strong> world.\n')

I use cprintf - display formatted colored text in Command Window - File Exchange - MATLAB Central (mathworks.com) for changing the font, style etc in MATLAB window. But I didn't tested this on Live Script.

[Rodney Smith]

Thanks for the help. I downloaded cprintf and found that it does work in Live Script. Very useful, thanks for letting me know about it.

However, there is no documentation in cprintf for changing the font (eg Times New Roman, 12 pt). Because cprintf works on the Command Window and in Live Script, I tried to change the font in Preferences>Matlab>Font>Desktop code font but this doesn't do anything in Live Script.

The example you gave for bold also works in Live Script, but I don't know much HTML; any idea how to use it for changing the font size?

Other functionality will be fun to work with. Thanks for your help

[Ankit]

As of release R2021a you can format text in the live Editor (see below link)

Format Text in the Live Editor - MATLAB & Simulink - MathWorks Deutschland

Also do have a look on below MATLAB answers. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any other solutions.

MATLAB Live Script Editor Change Font - (mathworks.com)

How do I change font size for Live Scripts? - (mathworks.com)

[Walter Roberson]

@Ankit

Unfortunately those methods do not permit selective change to output. The discussion about inserting headers and so on, and the rest of the associated formatting items, have to do with creating fixed text fields, such as for reports or such as if you were creating a "notebook" showing someone how to compute something.

As far as I was able to determine when I checked at some point last year, dynamic changes were only possible by computing MathML and asking for it to be displayed. Sort of like building up a character vector of LaTeX code and then asking for it to be sent to the display, except MathML instead of LaTeX

[Ankit]

@Walter Roberson Thanks for this information. This is new to me

[Rodney Smith]

@Walter Roberson

Looked up MathML, the learning curve for this is more than I want to climb for my purposes.

Seems weird that there is no way to adjust the font of the text output. Matlab must have a default font for this somewhere, and from my experimentation, cprintf operates on that font. For now, I'll just live with this.

Wished I had asked sooner, because I spent a lot of time trying things that didn't work ;-) .

Thanks for taking the time to answer

[Lorenzo Marchionne]

Hi @Rodney Smith, I've tried to use cprintf in Live Script but unfortunately it doesn't work to me (the printed text is always in black). However it does work properly if I use it in a standard script or directly in the command window.

I see you found the way to make it work in Live Script too. Would you be so kind to give me some extra info on how you managed to make it work in live scripts? It would be very appreciated. Thanks :)

[Rodney Smith]

I was premature when I said it works in Live Scripts.

The only thing that seems to work in Live Scripts is the style 'Hyper' , which prints out in blue.

'*Hyper' and '*Text' both print bold.

Sorry

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

The internal mechanism of getting LiveScript to display graphical representation, is to call

matlab.internal.language.signalVariableDisplay(VALUE, NAME)

where NAME is either '' or a character vector giving a displayable variable name (to display on the left hand side of '=' in the display)

VALUE is expected to be either a symbolic object or else a table object (if anything else is accepted, I have not seen evidence of that.)

I do not know how tables are formatted for this purpose.

For symbolic objects, the symbolic object has a property mathmlOutput which is normally created by createMathML(X,symSuggestions) where symSuggestions is the descriptor for the "Other actions" contextual menu (like "Copy output", "evaluate with vpa" and so on.) The createMathML call creates the basic MathML for the object by calling mathml() on the object.

If you put a breakpoint in at the right place in @sym/disp.m and you replace X.mathmlOutput with a different character vector of MathML, then you can get LiveScript to display the altered information. For example I was able to bold a term in a symbolic expression.

Unfortunately...

• repeated calls to matlab.internal.language.signalVariableDisplay() with altered mathmlOutput properties do not seem to have any effect
• calling matlab.internal.language.signalVariableDisplay() outside of @sym/disp.m does not seem to have any effect

So, there might be a way to get arbitrary mathML output... but it is not obvious to program that.

I seem to recall from previous investigation that .mlx is zip'd XML and that for text headers and GIF images that it is encoded in mathML inside the XML. If that memory is correct then if, hypothetically, you could reliably trigger outputing arbitrary mathML then interesting outputs would become possible. Unfortunate that there is no clear way to do this.