Plotting Overview
Overview over the plotting faccilities of MTEX, including annotations, plot types, color coding, combined plots and export of plots.
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Plotting in MTEX |
Plot Types |
Spherical Projections |
Color Coding |
Plot Annotations |
Combined Plots |
Exporting Plots |
Plotting in MTEX
In MTEX you can plot almost any type data. Simply apply the plot command to any variable and MTEX tries to plot the content of the variable in the most intuive way. In this way you can plot three Miller indeces, rotations, pole figures, or ODFs. MTEX also offers you a wide range of possibilities to custumize your plots, e.g. by changing the plot style, the spherical projection, the color coding, or by adding colorbars or other annotations to the plot. You can even combine plots of different ODFs or EBSD data. This way MTEX allows you to create publication ready plots which can be exported to almost any format using the commands savefigure.
Plot Types
In general MTEX knows the following plot types
- contour plots
- filled contour plots
- smoots plots
- scatter plots
- line plots
Contour plots are plots consisting only of contour lines and mainly used for pole figure or ODF plots. For raw pole figure data MTEX uses by default a plot where each datapoint is represented by a single dot colored accordingly to the intensity. Line plots are used by MTEX for one dimesional ODF plots, plots of Fourier coefficients and plots of kernel functions functions
Spherical Projections
Whenever MTEX plots pole figures, ODFs, or crystal or specimen directions MTEX uses spherical projections to map the spherical data to the plane. By doing so MTEX supports a wide varity of spherical projections, i.e.,
- equal area projection (Schmidt)
- equal distance projection
- equal angle projection (stereographic)
- plain
- 3d plots
Color Coding
A central issue when interpreting plots is to have a consistent color coding among all plots. In MTEX this can be achieved in two ways. If the the minimum and maximum value is known then one can use one of the following syntaxes to have a consistent color coding.
- Specifying the colorrange
- Setting a logarithmic color scale
- Switching to a monochrome color scale * See also color coding EBSD.
Plot Annotations
After generating a plot with MTEX it is possible to modify it interactivly using the MATLAB plotting tools in the plotting figure. This includes
- adding a colorbar
- adding a legend
- adding annotations
- resizing / shifting parts of the plot
This is described in more detail here.
Combined Plots
Sometimes it is usefull to combine several plots, e.g. plotting on the top of an inverse pole figure some important crystall directions. This can be performed by the command hold all, which preserfes MATLAB from replacing the old plot by the new one. This technique is described in more detail here.
Exporting Plots
Plots generated by MTEX can be exported to a wide range of formats using the MATLAB function save as in the figure menu or using the command savefigure
MTEX 4.0.10 |