Why am I unable to display certain characters in the upper ASCII range in the title of my plot in MATLAB 7.0 (R14)?

When I execute the following command in MATLAB 7.0 (R14):

title(char([129 130 131]),'fontname','wingdings')

I receive a title in which the first character is correctly displayed (a one with a circle around it), but the next two characters appear as empty rectangles. This same command works in MATLAB 6.5.1 (R13SP1) and earlier versions.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

Constructs like the one in the example that use the char[] syntax are strongly discouraged for the following reasons:

1. The code is not portable. The availability of a particular font varies among platforms, and its encoding may also vary, even on the same platform.

2. While MATLAB guarantees the character set is unicode, it does not guarantee a particular encoding. MATLAB may change encoding in future releases.

A MATLAB user suggests the NATIVE2UNICODE function can be used as a workaround to convert an ASCII set of bytes to unicode characters, as in the following:

title(native2unicode([129 130 131]),'fontname','wingdings')

Type "doc native2unicode" at the MATLAB prompt to see the documentation for this function.