Editing Legend Items for hatchfill2

I want to know more about how legends and their icons work so that I can add hatching to icons for the hatchfill2 function (link).

Here's what I know about how these icons work so far

suppose we have the following code:

A = magic(4);
plot(A)
leg = legend;

We may be able to create a simple figure with a legend

Through some troubleshooting, I have found that we may obtain information about the legend icone as follows:

openvar('leg.EntryContainer.Children(j).Children(1).Transform.Children.Children')

where, in this case,

j = 1:4

since we are plotting

A = magic(4)

the resulting properties are visible:

We may verify that our understanding is correct by modifying the properties as follows:

leg.EntryContainer.Children(1).Children(1).Transform.Children.Children.LineWidth = 5;

with the following output:

If we go up a level, we can see that we can see that this is a "LineStrip" Object

If we change our initial code to

A = magic(4);
area(A)
leg = legend;

we see that we have

openvar('leg.EntryContainer.Children(1).Children(1).Transform.Children')

which itself is composed of

My question is how to edit these items. Ultimately, I think the best work around I can think of is to somehow layer on multiple LineStrip objects to create the hatching, but I can't see to figure out how to layer another obejct or if this is even the best way to do this. Any input would be appreciated.

Answer 1

[DGM]

There are a couple examples in the answers here:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/478956-getting-hatchfill-to-properly-display-a-patch-legend

If I recall correctly, both worked when I tested them, though I don't recall whether there were any particular caveats or benefits to either.

[Dani Agramonte]

Looking through the code, I found that post MATLAB 9.0.0, they changed how legends worked, and the author specifically uses the legacy version of creating legends, which just creates legends as axis objects. This certainly works, but I was interested in knowing if anyone new anything about the post 9.0.0 legend objects/how their objects are made.

For reference:

% The new legend objects are pretty opaque... even diving into the 
% undocumented properties, I haven't been able to find the handles of 
% the legend sub-components (lines, text, etc).  So I need to stick to 
% the legacy version, which creates an axis object rather than legend 
% object. Legacy version has bug in text properties parsing, though, so 
% need to work around that too: use the new-style legend object to get
% proper text properties, then use those to alter the buggy old-style
% legend.

The solution is good though, thanks!