Modify Figures in Live Scripts

In the Live Editor, you can interactively modify figures in the output. Use the provided tools to explore data and add formatting and annotations to your figures. Then, update your code to reflect changes using the generated code.

Explore Data

You can interactively explore figures in the output using the toolbar that appears in the upper-right corner of the axes when you hover over a figure. The tools available depend on the contents of the axes, but typically include zooming, panning, rotating, exporting, and restoring the original view.

Zooming, panning, and rotating the axes let you explore different views of your data. By default, you can scroll or pinch to zoom into and out from the view of the axes. You also can drag to pan (2-D view) or drag to rotate (3-D view). Gesture-based interactions are not supported in R2018a and previous releases.

You can enable more interactions by clicking the zoom-in , zoom-out , pan , and rotate buttons in the axes toolbar. For example, click the zoom-in button if you want to drag a rectangle to zoom into a region of interest.

Note

When you open a saved live script, a blue information icon appears next to each output figure, indicating that the interactive tools are not available yet. To make these tools available, run the live script.

Suppose that you want to explore the health information of 100 patients. Create a live script called patients_smoking.mlx and add code that loads the data and adds a scatter plot that shows the systolic blood pressure of patients that smoke versus patients that do not smoke, by age. Run the code by going to the Live Editor tab and clicking Run .

load patients

figure
scatter(Age(Smoker==1),Systolic(Smoker==1));
hold on
scatter(Age(Smoker==0),Systolic(Smoker==0));
hold off

Scatter plot showing the systolic blood pressure of smoking and non-smoking patients by age

Explore the points where the patient is between 35 and 40 years old. Select the zoom-in button and drag a rectangle around the points between the 35 and 40 x-axis markers. The view zooms into the selected region.

Scatter plot with the zoom-in button on the axes toolbar selected and a rectangle drawn around the data points between 35 and 40 years

Add Formatting and Annotations

In addition to exploring the data, you can format and annotate your figures interactively by adding titles, labels, legends, grid lines, arrows, and lines. To add an item, first select the desired figure. Then, go to the Figure tab and select one of the available options. To add a formatting or annotation option to your favorites, click the star at the top right of the desired annotation button.

This table describes the available formatting and annotation options.

Option	Description
Title	Add a title to the axes. To modify an existing title, click the existing title and enter the modified text.
X-Label Y-Label	Add a label to the axes. To modify an existing label, click the existing label and enter the modified text.
Legend	Add a legend to the figure. To modify the existing legend descriptions, click the existing descriptions and enter the modified text. To remove the legend, select Remove Legend from the Figure tab.
Colorbar	Add a colorbar legend to the figure. To remove the colorbar legend, select Remove Colorbar from the Figure tab.
Grid X-Grid Y-Grid	Add grid lines to the axes. To remove all the grid lines from the axes, select Remove Grid from the Figure tab.
Line Arrow Text Arrow Double Arrow	Add a line or arrow annotation to the figure. Draw the arrow from tail to head. To move an existing annotation, click the annotation to select it and drag it to the desired location. To remove the selected annotation, press the Delete key.

Option

Description

Title

Add a title to the axes.

To modify an existing title, click the existing title and enter the modified text.

X-Label

Y-Label

Add a label to the axes.

To modify an existing label, click the existing label and enter the modified text.

Legend

Add a legend to the figure.

To modify the existing legend descriptions, click the existing descriptions and enter the modified text. To remove the legend, select Remove Legend from the Figure tab.

Colorbar

Add a colorbar legend to the figure.

To remove the colorbar legend, select Remove Colorbar from the Figure tab.

Grid

X-Grid

Y-Grid

Add grid lines to the axes.

To remove all the grid lines from the axes, select Remove Grid from the Figure tab.

Line

Arrow

Text Arrow

Double Arrow

Add a line or arrow annotation to the figure. Draw the arrow from tail to head.

To move an existing annotation, click the annotation to select it and drag it to the desired location.

To remove the selected annotation, press the Delete key.

For example, suppose that you want to add a title, axes labels, a legend, grid lines, and an arrow annotation to the figure in patients_smoking.mlx.

To add a title, go to the Figure tab, and select Title. A blue rectangle appears prompting you to enter text. Type the text Systolic Blood Pressure vs. Age and press Enter.
To add axes labels, go to the Figure tab, and select X-Label. A blue rectangle appears prompting you to enter text. Type the text Age and press Enter. Select Y-Label. A blue rectangle appears prompting you to enter text. Type the text Systolic Pressure and press Enter.
To add a legend, go to the Figure tab, and select Legend. A legend appears at the upper-right corner of the axes. Click the data1 description in the legend and replace the text with Smoking. Click the data2 description in the legend and replace the text with Non-Smoking. Press Enter.
To add grid lines, go to the Figure tab, and select Grid. Grid lines appear in the axes.
To update the code, in the selected figure, click the Update Code button. The live script now contains the code needed to reproduce the figure changes.
```
grid on
legend(["Smoker","Non-Smoker"])
title("Systolic Blood Pressure vs. Age")
xlabel("Age")
ylabel("Systolic Pressure")
```

Scatter plot with a title, axes labels, grid lines, and a legend containing two items

Update Code with Figure Changes

When modifying output figures in live scripts, changes to the figure are not automatically added to the script. With each interaction, the Live Editor generates the code needed to reproduce the interactions and displays this code either underneath or to the right of the figure. Use the Update Code button to add the generated code to your script. This enables you to reproduce the interactions the next time you run the live script.

For example, in the live script patients_smoking.mlx, after zooming in on patients between 35 and 40 years of age, click the Update Code button.

Scatter plot with a code section underneath containing the generated code from zooming in, an Update Code button which is circled in red, and a Copy button

MATLAB^® adds the generated code for the interaction after the line containing the code for creating the plot.

xlim([34.92 39.97])
ylim([105.9 139.8])

If the Live Editor is unable to determine where to place the generated code, the Update Code button is disabled. This occurs, for example, if you modify the code without running the script again. In this case, use the Copy button to copy the generated code into the clipboard. You then can paste the code into your script at the appropriate location.

Save and Print Figure

At any point during figure modification, you can choose to save or print the figure for future use.

To save the figure, click the Export button in the axes toolbar and select from the available options. For more information on saving figures, see Save Plot as Image or Vector Graphics File or Save Figure to Reopen in MATLAB Later.

To print the figure, click the Open in figure window button in the upper-right corner of the figure. This opens the figure in a separate figure window. Then, select File > Print. For more information on printing figures, see Print Figure from File Menu.

Note

Any changes made to the figure in the separate figure window are not reflected in the live script. Similarly, any changes made to the figure in the live script are not reflected in the open figure window.