Bad property value found

I am using GUIDE (GUI) and I am getting this error:

Error using set
Bad property value found.
Object Name: uicontrol
Property Name: 'BackgroundColor'.

The line that is giving me the error is:

set(handles.text410, 'BackgroundColor', b{4,
10});

b is a cell of colors and b{4, 10} = 'Orange'

I have a bunch of text boxes, and I don't know why it is giving me this error. I have 45 previous set statements with the same format that all work perfectly. Also, I am positive I have the correct tag.

Thanks so much in advance!

[Mike Garrity]

MATLAB Graphics knows a fairly limited number of colors by name. Orange isn't one of them. You can get other colors by using numeric RGB values.

[Stephen23]

The list of colornames recognized by MATLAB:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/colorspec.html

I don't see "orange" on that list.

Answer 1

[dpb]

'Orange' is not one of the named colors; only one of the eight 'yellow', 'magenta', 'cyan', 'red', 'green', 'blue', 'white', 'black' have common names; you'll have to use the numeric RGB triplet form in your assignment instead or make the array an enumeration class (altho I've not tested the HG property value will accept one for certain, left as "exercise for the student" :) )

ADDENDUM

While one can make enumerations work, I'm not terribly adept but the only way I got working shortly is pretty klunky to use. Maybe somebody else can improve on the following (adapted from a TMW example)

>> type Colors
classdef Colors
 properties
    R = 0;
    G = 0;
    B = 0;
    RGB=[0 0 0];
 end
 methods
    function c = Colors(r, g, b)
       c.R = r; c.G = g; c.B = b;
       c.RGB= [c.R c.G c.B];
    end
 end
 enumeration
    Orange    (222/255,125/255,0)
 end
end
>>

Can manage to use this as

>> plot(x,y,'color',Colors.Orange.RGB)
>>

But this seems to me to require too much intimate knowledge of the class to be desirable. Need some way to be able to return the desired RGB vector from just the name but I couldn't figure out a syntax to do that in the short time I've played with it. (If you can't tell, I'm not an OO kinda' guy... :) )

[Stephen23]

Simply use my FEX submission http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/48155-convert-between-rgb-and-colornames to select the color by name, and return its RGB values:

[~,RGB] = colornames('CSS','Orange')

It supports lots of standard sets of named colors, such as CSS, HTML, RAL, etc. The colors can be specified by name, or by matching to the closest RGB values.

[dpb]

Very nice, Stephen--useful, indeed. The only nit I see is the need for a temporary in the subject application as there's no syntax to use the second return value in an argument. Could write a wrapper or define an anonymous function to handle it, of course.

Still seems there ought to be a way to get an enumeration to simply return the values, though, but I don't have the time to try to keep delving into syntax at the moment.