Exponent Property of Colorbar

In standard axes I am able to change the Exponent property to force scientific notation. In this specific case I have an axes that contains an image overlayed with a colormap, I use a colorbar as a legend to the colormap. I am not able to access the Exponent property of the colorbar through either the parent axes handle nor the colorbar handle.

I found a workaround on Stackoverflow that I can rewrite, but I just wanted to check if I'm missing something obvious. SO Link: Stackoverflow Link

Thank you for any insight.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

   cb = colorbar();
   cb.Ruler.Exponent = 2;

[Software Developer]

First of all, thank you very much for the prompt reply, you saved me a lot of time. Secondly, I can't believe how simple that was. I still can't find how the Ruler object relates to the colorbar in the documentation. Is there a good guide for searching the doc for these hidden objects?

Again, thank you very much.

P.S.

[Walter Roberson]

See https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/1325-what-is-missing-from-matlab#comment_472496 for my tool for looking at properties of objects.

There are a lot of undocumented properties of graphics objects. Some of them are fairly mystifying, others clear but of no obvious use, and some are useful.

Note: some of the properties the mentioned tool finds can be examined and changed directly, but sometimes you need to use struct() to get at a higher level private handle that you can then set the properties of.

[Yair Altman]

See https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-axes-rulers - this has been posted way-back in 2014 and some of the fine details have changed since then, but the basic concept remained unchanged.

See the list of related posts at the bottom of that article for many other undocumented ways by which you can customize your plots.