colorbar floods 3dplots with text

If I run the following code

x=zeros(18,18); figure;surf(x);colorbar

I get a plot of a flat plane with a nicely behaved colorbar on the right side of the plot and a scale of numbers next to the colorbar showing the values associated with specific colors.

If I run this code instead (only thing that has changed is the dimension of the matrix)

x=zeros(18,19); figure;surf(x);colorbar

I still get a plot of a flat plane but now the entire field of the plot is filled with numbers that appear to be duplications of the scale values.

Any ideas what has gone wrong? I am using Matlab 2012 a

I still see a nice plane, but the entire

Answer 1

[Kelly Kearney]

Perhaps you could add a screenshot of what you see? Both lines of code produce the expected plane with colorbar plot on my system (also R2012a)... no errant text that I can see.

Without any other details, I might guess that it's an OpenGL rendering issue (most bizarre graphics display issues can be attributed to that). Does

 set(gcf, 'renderer', 'zbuffer')

fix things?

[Mark]

I couldn't figureout how to put a screen shot in this. However, your

set(gcf, 'renderer', 'zbuffer')

cleans it up (Thank you very very much). However I have to do that for every colorbar. Is there another workaround that I can run once per session? Otherwise I can leve with the set command.

[Sean de Wolski]

What OS are you on?

You can run:

>>opengl software

which will use the software implementation of OpenGL to avoid the various hardware bugs. Putting this in the startup file will make it persist.

[Kelly Kearney]

If you're on a Mac (where switching to software opengl isn't an option), you can run

opengl('neverselect')

instead, which causes Matlab to use zbuffer instead of opengl for appropriate figures.