Is it possible to manipulate a plot axis; i.e., divide values by 1000 so that the x axis range is 0 to 300 instead of 0 to 300000 and also get rid of exponential notation?

I am making X–Y plots of results from very long simulations. Right now, my plots are unsightly because:

1. The X axis goes from 1 to hundreds of thousands of femtoseconds.
2. Also, I don't get axis labels like "300000" (for example). I get scientific notation but it doesn't look good. I get "3.0" (for example) with a tiny "x 10^5) below the labels. I don't know how to get "300000" or add the scientific notation into each label on the axis.

Here is my plotting command:

plot(Velocity.TotalVelocity)

I know I could make an X–Y plot and divide the X (time) values by 1000 but then I'd end up with another huge array. So I'm wondering if there's a way to get the X values to appear in the plot as divided by 1000.

Thank you for any advice.

Answer 1

[Rik]

You can explicitly set the tick labels:

plot(linspace(0,3e5,10),rand(1,10))
xticklabels(arrayfun(@(x)strrep(sprintf('%.1e}',x),'e','x10^{'),xticks,'UniformOutput',false))

[Srh Fwl]

Thank you, Rik. Very helpful.

[Walter Roberson]

Note that when you do this, data tips will not agree with the displayed values unless you also configure custom data tips.

Answer 2

[Steven Lord]

If you access the numeric ruler associated with the coordinate axes using the XAxis, YAxis, or ZAxis properties of the axes object, the ruler has properties that may help you customize the appearance. See the list of properties you can customize on this documentation page.

x = 1:10;
y = x.^2;
h = plot(x, y);
ax = ancestor(h, 'axes');
xax = ax.XAxis;
xax.Exponent = 1;