How to make long title for a plot with automatic line breaks?

I would like to use a very long title, which should have lots of line breaks, but I want to put line breaks automatically to achieve a kind of justified paragraph visually.

Answer 1

[Alberto]

Multiline can be done using this syntax:

figure; 
str=['Line1', '\n', 'Line2'];
s=sprintf('Hello\nGoodbye');
title(s)

[Mr M.]

yes, I know

Answer 2

[Micke Malmström]

Write code to

1. Get the axis width (ha.Position), and fontsize (ha.Title.FontSize) in pixels (where ha is the handle to the axis of interest)
2. If you use fixed width font then it's easy to break the line with something like:

while length(ha.Title.String{end})>YourWidthValue
    ha.Title.String{end:end+1}=...
{ha.Title.String{end}(1:YourWidthValue) ;...
 ha.Title.String{end}(YourWidthValue:end)};
end

(have not debugged it...)

an even better way is to search backwards for the first space before your YourWidthValue...

Is it not a bit strange that matlab cannot provide this functionallity built in?

[Mr M.]

:) why in every years there are lots of updates and MATLAB is old, I think its time to format a title as we want, its not a big deal

Answer 3

[Micke Malmström]

ha=gca; NoCharPerLine= 78; % or whatever you want...
if ismatrix(ha(end).Title.String) && size(ha(end).Title.String,2)>NoCharPerLine
  II=strfind((ha(end).Title.String(1:NoCharPerLine)),' '); % find last occurence of a space
  LastSpaceIndex=II(end);
  ha(end).Title.String={ha(end).Title.String(1:LastSpaceIndex-1) ; 
ha(end).Title.String(LastSpaceIndex+1:end)};
end

if iscell(ha(end).Title.String)
    while size(ha(end).Title.String{end},2)>NoCharPerLine
        STR=ha(end).Title.String{end};
        II=strfind(STR,' '); % find last occurence of a space
        LastSpaceIndex=II(end);
        ha(end).Title.String{end}=STR(1:LastSpaceIndex-1);
        ha(end).Title.String{end+1}=STR(LastSpaceIndex+1:end);
    end
end

Answer 4

[Hannes]

Thanks Micke, that helped a lot!. Now I try to adapt your code to axes labels, but struggle with that task. Do you have this already available?

[Micke Malmström]

sorry, I dont have that problem with the lables...

What is your problem?

[Hannes]

The ylabel/xlabel don't have a title.string option to work with. So, I cannot just apply your code, it would need further re-coding, am I right?

Answer 5

[Jan]

This is a job for the textwrap command. Create an uicontrol('Style', 'text') at the wanted position and provide its handle to textwrap.

[Hannes]

I was hoping for a more generic solution without defining a position. At the moment I create a cell of strings and use it in the ylable:

ylabelname=strcat(A.Name(row),' _ ',A.Var(row),' (',A.Unit(row),')');

ylabel(ylabelname,'FontSize',9 , 'Interpreter', 'none', 'FontWeight','bold');

How do I now tell the label stay in a certain predefined width?

[Jan]

You do want to define a width, but not a position? Unfortunately Matlab cannot guess, what you want. Defining a uicontrol object of the style 'text' allows you to let textwrap do exactly, what you want. Therefore I suggest to use this solution instead of hoping for a more generic one. It is only 2 or 3 lines of code. You can even use this uicontrol only to let textwrap do its work, get its output and use it to call ylabel.

I've written a "more generic" solution, which is faster than textrwap. It has 350 lines of code.

[Hannes]

Thx for the response. I create a large set of subplots with many scatter plots, which are arranged in a mxn matrix, where m is the amount of input parameters and n is the amount of output parameters. I did not proceed with your approach since I hesitate to guess or somehow automate the calculation of the position for these text objects..

[Jan]

@Hannes Lück: This is a question from 2015. Prefer to open a new thread an explain your question exactly. Provide some example code to demonstrate the problem, then it is much easier to write a solution.